Alright, I've officially broken m 10,000 words for a single story! I feel fairly proud of myself. I'm exhausted from a massive headache, and I can't seem to get rid of it using aspirin. The OC is not going to rejoin The Flock in this chapter. He won't rejoin the flock in the next chapter either. Or the one after that. Got it?

Oh, and please send me more reviews! I just surpassed my first fan fiction in terms of sheer numbers. I'd give my thanks out to people, but this update is only a few days after my last one, so no one gave me any reviews between. I'll have to give thanks for both this chapter and the previous one next time.

The flock seemed to be in pretty good spirits when I joined them almost half a minute later. "Finally, we're out of there!" cheered Nudge. She stretched, soaking up the sun.

Gazzy gave a whoop and did a barrel roll, almost knocking Iggy out of the sky in the process, who was too busy cheering with Fang and the others to really notice or care. The joy was somewhat infectious, and I was about to join them when I noticed that Angel was the only one who wasn't joining in. In fact, she seemed to be hanging back from the rest of the flock.

"Angel?" I asked. It took her a second to pull her head up and answer me. She wasn't quite smiling, but I knew she was trying. Something had her upset, and I mean really upset.

"Huh?" she asked, brushing stray flapping golden hairs out of her face.

"What's wrong honey?" I asked, concerned. Seriously, when Angel was upset, things were about to go bad in very short order. As Iggy once said: 'if Angel ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.'

She shrugged. "Where's Ghost?" She asked, looking behind me, as if she was going to see him flying behind me.

I sighed. "He stayed behind. He said that he had something to do."

"So, we won't see him again?"

"I guess not," I said. I was tempted to add a little something along the lines of 'sorry, but he made his choice' to try and make her understand. She seemed to trust Ghost a lot for someone who wasn't in the flock. He had flat out refused to answer questions and seemed to know too much, but she had still entrusted him with all our lives, so I guessed she had developed some sort of friendship with him between the time that she had been captured and when we had made our escape. I just hoped for her sake that he was alright.

"Good," she said. Her demeanor seemed to brighten a bit, as if something she'd been worried about no longer mattered. I did a double take and almost forgot to flap. Wishing someone to School was essentially wishing them to Hell. No, wait, on second thought Hell didn't perform experiments on you and graft body parts onto you at will. At least I hoped not.

"Why?" I finally asked. Angel had seemed content enough to have him lead us through the hallways, as if she trusted him implicitly, and had never even said anything to counter his advice. It was as if she had admired him, I had thought. Evidently, she didn't. "What's wrong with Ghost?"

"He was…" she frowned again, searching for the right words. It was something the little super genius very rarely did. "Off. His mind was different than everyone else's, maybe darker? There was something wrong with him, the way he thought. It was as if he was half here, and at the same time not."

Huh?

"I can show you what I saw if you want," she added brightly to my apparently open confusion.

"Uh…maybe later," I said lamely. When a telepath offered to 'show' you something, you had to make sure that A) you trusted that person completely to go and muck around in your head, and that B) it was an appropriate time. As while I trusted Angel on a lot of things, my mind was sort of personal property. Plus, right now was not one of those appropriate times, not with me midair and still so close to the school. Not that I wanted to ever be this close to The School. "Now let's catch up with the rest of the flock," I suggested. This certainly put a new spin on the situation, and not a very good one.

"Okay," she said, seemingly happy again. "When do we land?" she asked only a second later as we pulled up to the flock in regular formation.

"When we get tired. Why, are you getting tired yet?" I teased lightly.

"A little," she confessed. "They don't feed you well in there. And I never got any rest from earlier, so I'm a little sore. They made me run for hours. They just don't understand that hard work means we need more food."

"Hey, they just don't understand what it means to have a black hole for a stomach," I said, thinking of the incredible amount of food the flock could pack away. We were worse than a swarm of locusts, and woe to any buffet that dared display the words 'all you can eat.' I looked over to Angel. She didn't seem to be exhausted- not yet, anyways, and I was willing to fly my flock as far as they could haul their collective asses away from The School, even if it meant we were all exhausted the next day. The further away we were from The School when they finally got their helicopters to work, the better. "Just a little further, okay? I'd like for there to be a bit more distance between The School and ourselves."

"Okay," Angel said. "But what are we going to do about food? We can't scavenge in the dark, it's too dangerous."

Oops. I'd forgotten that while Ghost had given us our backpacks back from the supply room, they were empty of non-perishable goods, like granola bars, plus a few other items. The School figured we wouldn't need them anymore, so they'd naturally taken them. Interestingly, this was the biggest setback we had been faced with so far in our escape. We could keep going into the night and be way further from The School, but we wouldn't have any food to get us very far in the morning, which could be somewhat dangerous. We needed to be at 100 to fight. Foraging in the night was dangerous, as Angel had said. Coyotes, wolves, and bears sometimes were fairly common in the woods, and a general lack of what we might otherwise eat made night hunting more trouble than it was worth. Or we could risk landing in the daylight, cooking our food, and then taking off again…but still being in the search range of the helicopters, if they got repaired any time soon, which they probably would be. They would have no problem seeing the smoke from whatever campfire we made to cook the meals, too. And then we would be in real trouble, well fed or not.

Hunting in the dark was not a good idea, either. Wait a second I thought. I looked down to my new utility belt. Inside one of the pockets was a flashlight. "We will just have to go hunting with flashlights. Did you know a deer stays dead still when headlights are pointing at it?" I asked, remembering the random factoid from an even more random book.

Everyone looked at me curiously. "So we're going to kill a deer?" Nudge asked.

"Pretty much. Plants are about the only other thing we can probably get at night, and we can't find them very easily in the dark." Fang explained for me.

"But still…I remember watching Bambi. We saw it only last month, remember?"

"Angel, we're sort of doing this for our survival," Iggy said. "Besides, not a lot of other animals are willing to stand around when spotted.

"But why not catch a fish, or a rabbit?" Nudge asked.

Finding Nemo and Peter Cottontail, I thought to myself. "Because they're not out during the night. And I'm not fishing in the dark."

"Can we stop discussing what we're having for dinner? You're making me hungry. We haven't eaten all day," Gazzy chipped in.

"We can give hunting at night a shot. We might not even find anything, in which case we go hungry," I said. "Angel, Nudge, and Iggy can hold down the fort and prepare the fire while we hunt."

"But I'm hungry now," Gazzy said lowly.

"We all are, Gazzy." Iggy said distractedly. "Where's Ghost?" Iggy finally asked me. It was the second time he'd asked me the question.

"I don't know," I said. "He…he didn't come with us. He said he had something to deal with first." Of course, that was about clear as mud.

"What?" Nudge asked in a disbelieving voice. "What the heck is so important to you that would make you wnat to stick around The School? He must be crazy!"

"Maybe he was trying to find information against the school, or maybe he forgot something," Gazzy said weakly. He then shrugged. "Nah, that wouldn't be it. Nudge is right, he's gotta be nuts!"

"It's kinda suspicious," Fang finally said. "I mean, it would be if he gets out of there in one piece."

"Maybe he's got a flock!" Nudge said brightly. I thought about it. It did make sense. We had all risked our collective lives just to save Angel, only one of our flock. And Angel, once free, had saved us. Yes, there was a considerable amount of irony in that, but we still all looked out for one another. "Aw, man, if that's true, then I can't wait to meet them all! It would be so cool!"

"But why didn't he set them free while he was with us?" I asked. Maybe what Angel had told me had made me paranoid.

"Well, if you recall, the alarms went off just as you finished sabotaging the helicopters. Maybe he knew we were on a time budget, and wanted to secure his flock's getaway. We wouldn't have gotten very far if those helicopters were already airborne by the time we left. Besides, with the base in total disarray, it would be pretty easy for him to get around," Fang answered. I marveled at his strategic genius. There was a future General or Police Officer in him, if only the Army or Police ever decided to accept genetic freaks into their ranks, which they wouldn't, and that was a damn shame because he wouldn't look that bad in uniform. I quickly erased the last thought, and decided to focus on more…relevant things at hand.

Things like my headache. It was one of those things that built slowly, hard to notice at first. All I know is that I had started getting them on and off ever since I'd had that unpleasant visit from Jeb while I'd still been caged. Was I sick? Could I be sick? It had never really happened to me before. Nudge and Gazzy had both quieted down, and so that left me with a great big zero for usual suspects. I was completely miffed. The only other thing I could think of was a lack of food. Supposedly, people sometimes got headaches if they didn't eat for very long. How long had I been unconscious? And why hadn't I ever had this problem before? I'd gone for days without food without anything wrong happening. Still, it was the only explanation I could think of.

As we continued to fly, however, the headache didn't go away. It got worse. I growled, attracting the unwanted attention of those next to me in the formation. I shook my head and forced it down. So much of my attention was focused inwards that I hardly noticed how much time had passed until the sun had almost set behind us, and I guessed from the looks on everyone's faces that we had gone that immeasurable distance of 'far enough' away. Plus, I was going to need some food, water, or rest to get rid of this monstrous headache.

"Okay everyone, time to bag us Bambi!" Gazzy said in his best southern redneck imitation, holding an imaginary shotgun. Not everyone laughed, but I had to admit that it was pretty funny. I just didn't feel like laughing. I forced my raging headache down again, ignoring it no longer a possibility. In the last minute it had gone from a constant thrum of pain to a high pitched whine. Spikes of pain randomly shot through my skull, making me almost flinch every time they went off. What in the world is going on? I asked myself. My hands were cold, and I felt like I was losing control of my own body.

As if the situation wasn't rocky enough, another spike slammed and buried itself into my skull, forcing me to give a whimper. Why was this happening? I felt like I was about to pass out from pulling too many G's. I fought for altitude, forcing my wings into action. Everything was a blur, even the rapidly approaching ground. My whole body was numb now, and I couldn't feel the wind I knew had to be rushing past me as I plummeted the remaining distance.

Somewhere deep inside, I found a tiny pocket of reserve strength, what remained of my control. And as I exhausted the pits of my strength, I made one last effort to control my descent.

The end for now...will update soon again.

Look, I've been reading over my stories, and I know they are lacking certain elements. Unfortunately, I'm sort of clueless as to what it's missing. Grumption? Detail for setting? Detail for action parts? Better dialogue? More humor, less humor? More cliffhangers or surprises or less? I don't know what it is. Maybe a change in writing style? Lose the OC entirely (and thus leave no explanation to the change in the whole storyline?) I know I'm ignorant to the problem, and ignorance is supposedly bliss. But ignorance is not bliss if you already know you're ignorant, because what you don't know will bug you in the back of your head until you want to scream.

I also planned to have this chapter up sooner, but I fell short of completing it as a chapter in its own before I ran out of creativity. No more muses, unfortunately, because they're unionized and are on strike, demanding longer breaks and more sleep hours. If they hadn't gone on strike, I would have had this up Friday the 11th of June. Sorry for the delay and (relatively) short chapter. For those of you who don't know, Max is having chip troubles. This (like most of the rest of this story) has nothing to do with the OC.

This chapter is probably going to be either edited or rewritten, because I'm not satisfied with it…but I can't write it any better right now, so it's staying the way it is.