A/N: Happy Holidays! Thanks to XII Dragon, alexz1jude, plainlyironic, JFW1415, Bittersweet Romanticide, chalina, LostinLaLaLand0820, katy, and npc.angel.111, the (cough) ONLY nine people who reviewed the last chapter out of my 71 alerts. Shame. Shame. Shame. Oh, wait – it's the holidays. That's why. Oh, and to katy: Since my replies didn't get to you (I tried!) I'll reply really quickly now. I know you review every chapter and have absolutely no idea how you always know when I've posted: do you check every day? Kudos to you and thanks so much!

'Precautions' turned out to be an electric collar around our necks that was impossible to take off. The brunette scientist followed behind Fang and I with an insane-o smile on her face, holding the remote that probably had the button on it to shock us if we did something wrong. We were marched down the hallway of the new facility like prisoners to the gallows.

I guessed that we were somewhere close to Sweden, maybe Finland, because the building's layout and interior didn't look familiar at all. Flyboys patrolled the hallways as guards, and their eyes stared at me like I was a piece of raw meat. I wondered if these were the shape shifting kind, or if they were just robots.

The woman poked me in the back with the butt of the remote. "Turn left here." I glared at her, but I turned. I really hoped she was actually leading us to the Flock and not to some torture chamber.

Which probably sounds far fetched for you, but for us, sadly, it's pretty normal.

We headed down another hallway that had windows into other labs. Unwillingly, I glanced into one, and felt my blood run cold with shock. Inside was an experiment much like the nano-bullets we'd seen in Germany, but they were cleverly disguised as pollen. As I watched, a bird was released into the chamber, and all of the bullets froze. In the next second, the bird was on the floor in shreds.

I turned away, sick. Imagine walking into a field of flowers – all is good, there's just pollen floating above you – and the next thing you know, you're dead.

Fang noticed my face and murmured, "Just don't look. You're fine." The whitecoat poked him in the back as well.

"Shut up," she threatened, "or I'll shock you."

Ah. So they were shock collars. At least we knew.

We walked past another window, and I saw a flash of familiar brown. I froze in horror and turned toward the window. "Please, please, tell me that's Nudge's clone," I whispered. Fang looked at me and then at the window. The skin around his jaw tensed, and I knew he was afraid.

Nudge – or, hopefully, her clone - was on an operating table. There were two whitecoats in the room. One was lowering a surgical instrument closer to her head. The other stood by with a clipboard. I started toward the window, mouth open to shout a warning, but was stopped by an enormous shock from the whitecoat. You know that spark you get from static electricity when you touch someone or something? Multiply that by about a thousand, and you get a sharp, white hot jolt that was shot straight through my neck. It hurt like hell, and practically threw me to the floor

I scrunched up my shoulders around the collar in a feeble attempt to ward off the pain, but in the next second it was gone. "Don't move," smiled the brunette scientist, "I warned you that you would get shocked. I'll do it again if you move."

I clenched my fists and looked at Fang. He nodded by a fraction, telling me to come back. I frowned slightly, but he just nodded again. He better be right.

I returned to the whitecoat, half expecting another shock, but it didn't come. She smiled again in the half-light. "Very good. Follow me." She set off again, striding through the hallways like she owned the place.

"What was that about?" I hissed to Fang, too low for the whitecoat to hear. "Do you want Nudge to be killed?"

"It wasn't Nudge," he replied just as quietly. "It was her clone."

"How do you know? You never saw her clone!"

"She was skinnier than Nudge. And they would have needed more than two whitecoats in the room to subdue Nudge, she would have taken them both out. She has spirit, and I'm guessing her clone doesn't. Trust me." I turned to get a last look at whichever Nudge it was, not entirely convinced, but I couldn't see it anymore.

We stopped at a door a few minutes later. The whitecoat held open her eye, which was scanned, and then placed her right hand on a scan pad to the right of the door. This too was scanned. Next, she took a cotton ball and swiped her arm. Noticing us watching her every move, she explained cockily, "DNA scan. You can't fool that." She placed the cotton ball on a tray, which beeped. The door finally unlocked and whooshed open.

Wow.

We went inside, and I had to restrain myself from shoving aside the woman and getting to my flock. The only thing stopping me was that I didn't know how high the shock could go. The room looked exactly like ours, but with more beds. Each bed was occupied by a Flock member. Each of them was still knocked out. Nudge was farthest away, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. Her crazy hair was splayed across the pillow, but she didn't look like she'd been moved. There was another whitecoat inside of the room.

I summed up the situation. One door locked from the outside, two whitecoats, and a camera. The camera wasn't too high and my wings weren't tied, I could take out the camera while Fang started on the whitecoats. Hopefully he'd get to the woman before she got the chance to shock me…

The woman's speech brought me back to earth. "Here lie the 'powerful' experiments that have thwarted Itex for so long. What's happened to you now? Four of you are knocked out and the other two are helpless. You are done running."

I could hear stirring from two beds away and whipped my head around. Iggy was starting to wake up. Unlike the ones that we had had, there were no metal restraints holding him to the bed, and he sat up, opening his eyes even though there was nothing for him to see. "Hello?" he asked.

"Iggy," I breathed.

He turned toward me. "Max! You're okay!"

"Quiet, mutant," hissed the brunette. "You're here to die, not to talk." I'd already guessed that, but hearing it sped up my heart rate until I was almost sure that she could hear it even with human hearing. Iggy stiffened as he listened to his surroundings, and I figured he could tell by the breathing that there were whitecoats in the room as well as the flock.

We stood in silence for awhile. I moved subtly closer to Fang and brushed against his arm. I looked at him, to the remote and then back to him. He glanced back at me to show he understood. As soon as the younger three were awake, we'd put our plan into action.

Soon, they began to stir, and I looked expectantly at Nudge, the oldest out of them. As soon as she came to, she started talking, which reassured me that it was really the clone that we had seen and that this was the real Nudge. "Max?" she said, looking at me. "Where are we? What's going on? Where's Total?" I'd completely forgotten Total in my worry over the Flock, and I sighed inwardly as I realized Angel wouldn't leave without him.

"Quiet!" ordered the whitecoat again as Gazzy and Angel woke up. Their wide blue eyes looked at me expectantly. They were all counting on me to save them, to get them out of this. It was up to me.

"You are here to be exterminated," began the brunette whitecoat. "The agents of Itex in Germany failed to do their duty, and as this is the closest facility, you were brought here." A smug look crossed her face as she added, "This is also the best facility."

She began pacing in front of us, and I groaned out loud without thinking. "Are you going to start in on a monolog? We've heard it so many times, please just kill us and spare us the boredom."

She glared at me, but no shock came. She continued, "A team of highly trained scientists will inject a powerful serum into your veins. It will knock you out first, but it will eventually deprive your cells of oxygen, and you will die."

"So basically, you're poisoning us."

"You could call it that," she shrugged. "I prefer the term 'retire'."

"Whatever," I spat. I stepped lightly on Fang's foot.

"Ready," he whispered so low that even I could hardly hear him.

"So," I wondered out loud, tensing for the jump towards the camera, "are we going to die…NOW!" I jumped up, spreading my wings to keep me airborne. I broke the camera with one swift roundhouse as Fang punched the brunette square in the face and knocked the remote out of her hands. Blood gushed from her broken nose, and she collapsed to the floor. Fang tossed the remote to Nudge, who swung her feet off the table and jumped to the floor.

"Figure out how to get these things off us!" he ordered.

I folded my wings and dropped to the ground in front of the other whitecoat, who just looked shocked. "Send this message to the rest of you," I growled, and delivered a hard uppercut into his ribs. I heard one crack, and he sank to the floor.

Nudge's thin-fingered hand was hovering over the buttons on the remote. Her face was creased with worry. She paused over one button. I realized it was the same button used to shock us and cried, "Not that button! Don't press that!"

"Got it!" she said back.

"Work fast," said Fang to Nudge as he lifted Angel off of the table and set her on the ground. "Someone's going to be coming down here." She nodded, and pressed a button. The collars released us and fell to the floor.

"Yes!" She said triumphantly.

"Let's go!" I cried, opening the door and practically shoving the flock outside. We sprinted down the hallway, which was miraculously still free of whitecoats. "Right! Turn right!" I ordered, and we skidded around a turn.

"Total!" cried Angel unexpectedly. "Wait!" I stopped, as she was standing still in front of a door. I could tell she was influencing whoever was inside, because her face was screwed up in concentration. The door was opened by a very confused whitecoat, and Total sprinted out on his short legs.

"Okay, great, let's go!" I shouted. I could see a door up ahead, and I guessed that it was the exit. Before we could reach it, alarms started sounding, and Flyboys began pouring out of doors.

A computerized female voice began to repeat, "Security breach. All robots to the first floor. Security breach. All robots to the first floor."

We ran even faster, if that was possible, straining to get to the door before the Flyboys could hold us back. Fang reached it first and tried the handle. "It's locked!" he shouted in frustration.

"Move!" I shouted back, and did a flying side kick into the door. Part of it crunched beneath my foot, and though it wasn't broken down, the locks were damaged. "Push it open!" I panted to Fang. "Move, move, move!"

He slammed into it with his shoulder, and it swung open, careening crazily on its hinges. We ran out as the Flyboys drained into our hallway behind us.

The exit opened into a forest so dense that there was no way that I could spread my wings to fly. We would have to run on foot. Fang took off first through the woods, then Gazzy, Iggy, Nudge, Angel, and finally me. We wove through the trees at top speed, putting as much distance between us and the Itex building as possible.

I heard a sharp sound behind me and groaned. Machine gun fire rippled through the air, but luckily missed its targets. "Go faster!" I yelled to Fang. "They're right on top of us!"

Another round of fire came through, but we weren't as lucky. The bullets barely missed, and I turned to face our pursuers. Twenty Flyboys or so were behind us, their gun arms pointed at us. They all had expressions of malice on their faces.

So macho.

They fired again, and this time a bullet grazed my arm. I hissed and looked down. A shallow groove had been cut out of my left forearm, but it had missed my wing, thankfully. Blood began streaming out of it, and I clamped a hand to it to try and staunch the bleeding.

The forest became denser as we went deeper, and the Flyboys had to slow down to avoid hitting the trees with their bulk, while we skinny bird kids flitted through the trees. I was gasping for breath. We might be fit and made for work, but sprinting for miles takes it out of the best of us. Yeah, yeah, there are marathon runners, but they don't sprint three minute miles, do they?

We lost the Flyboys, but didn't stop until Iggy yelled, "WAIT!"

I skidded to a stop and started towards him, but he cried, "No! Don't move!"

I froze mid step. "What? What is it?"

He stood as still as stone. "Motion sensors. I'd bet anything they'll set off a bomb."

And he would know. I didn't ask how he knew about the sensors.

Crap, I suddenly realized, even if we don't move, something else might.

"Can we move backward?" Fang asked Iggy. Even his lips barely moved.

"Uh-uh," whispered Iggy. "Trap."

Angel's eyes widened. "Max."

"What?" I was so not in the mood for talking right now.

"People! There are people coming this way!" she cried. I could hear them now, yakking about a camping trip and tramping through the trees, and I'm sure she could hear their thoughts.

My muscles were starting to hurt from standing still in this position for so long, and now our situation was worse. I looked at Fang without turning my head. "No," he said immediately, knowing what I was thinking. "Don't."

"But I can't – if they set off the sensors – we'll all die!"

His jaw clenched. "Call out if you have to. But do not move."

I sighed in frustration. There was nothing more I could do. "HEY!" I shouted. "GO BACK! YOU'LL GET HURT!"

"Is that a chick?" asked a male voice. Great. Teenage guys on top of all this.

"Angel!" I cried. "Mind control, please!"

"What's going on?" asked the other human.

Angel had a look of concentration on her face. "It won't work as well!" she said desperately. "They get ideas of going back, and I'm so close, but-"

"It's okay," I interrupted. "Keep trying."

"Plan B?" asked Gazzy, deathly pale.

"Yeah," I said, but there was none.

Trap. It's an ugly word.

Iggy drew in a shuddering breath. "Oh, no."

"What?" I asked, dreading the answer.

"I heard…like a…click. A metallic click." He said, a frown forming. Recognition dawned across his face, along with horror. "A gun. It's on the left."

"You must die," came a sudden, flat voice. Flyboy.

"DUCK!" I shouted, throwing my arms over the nearest flock members and pushing them down with all of my strength. I tucked my head in and hoped that death would come quickly – our movements would set off the bomb, and the Flyboy was going to shoot at us.

The Flyboy opened fire at the same time I heard a loud explosion. I was dimly aware of a hand on the small of my back and braced myself for a bullet or the bomb, but –

I felt nothing.

It seriously freaked me out. No wind, no sound…it was like the tank all over again, but ten times worse. I don't think you get how literally I mean nothing.

Was I dead?