A/N For those of you who'd already read chapter 19, I decided to split it into two chapters - it was about four thousand words long and contained a lot of new information, so I thought it would be better in two more manageable chunks. Hopefully it'll be easier to take in this way!

Fang's heart pounded in his chest as he was escorted along the lifeless corridor. "Lifeless". Yeah, great word choice there, considering where you're going. It wasn't that he was afraid, exactly. He hadn't been afraid for himself since he was a kid, before they'd escaped from the School the first time; sure, he'd been scared for the others, multiple times in fact, but a long time ago he'd decided that fear wasn't something he could indulge in. It was too much of a luxury, to be afraid – it took up energy and addled your thoughts and all-in-all made you suck more at the very moments you needed to just get on with things. So that's what he did: just got on with things. And this was something he'd had to do.

So no, it wasn't that he was afraid. But it wasn't like he wanted to die, either. And if he had to die now then he'd really rather it wasn't to save Dylan. In a perfect world, he'd die on some island somewhere when he was in his nineties, with his family around him and no worries about psychotic scientists or vicious mutants. This was far from a perfect world – if there was anything to prove that it would be the look on Max's face when he'd stepped away from her. The way she grabbed his arm, her breath on his neck when he'd leaned in to whisper in her ear, her begging him not to go; she'd looked so lost, so helpless, that all he'd really wanted to do was pull her up into his arms and just hold her there, forever if he could. He hated the fact that he'd hurt her again – God, again – but that was a short-term kind of thinking. When he'd looked away, when he'd sent his gaze across the rest of the group and his eyes had ended on Dylan, looking stunned and frozen by the wall, he'd known that he had to go through with his plan. He'd thought back to that awful talk with Max on the mountain, replayed the expression on her face and how broken she'd sounded because of everything he'd done… And he'd known that he wasn't what she needed. It wasn't one of those lame if-I-cant'-have-her-then-I-don't-want-to-live things, although the pain of having lost her still felt like it could be capable of killing him all by itself, but his reasoning went something like this: no matter how long the group could have hidden Dylan's identity from the whitecoat at the door, he eventually would've been picked out and taken away. And then Max would've lost a chance at being happy, maybe one of her last. As much as Fang hated the idea of her being with Dylan, he had to consider the fact that the guy could be good for her. Better than Fang himself. After everything he'd done wrong, all the times he'd hurt her, he'd realised that this was one last thing he could do to try and make amends. If Dylan stayed alive, then perhaps Max could be happy with him, and when it came to her happiness, "perhaps" was enough for Fang; any chance he could give her was enough.

The idea that death was inevitable, that there was nothing he could do to stop it, should've made him feel angry, helpless, depressed, or at the very least slightly troubled, but it didn't; instead, he felt kind of liberated. The fact that he was doing this for a steadfast reason, that there was no question in his mind about it, helped too. The adrenaline pushing itself through his blood made him shake a little, but it also made him feel light. Kind of floaty. Fang grimaced slightly; 'floaty' was not a word that he would normally use. But messing around with the intricacies of language seemed incredibly pointless just minutes away from death, and anyhow, it definitely described the way he was feeling well enough. In a way it was like he wasn't really there; he wasn't being walked down a grey corridor by enhanced laser-toting kids and a nervous-looking scientist. Everything just seemed a bit not-real. It was a strange sensation, one that Fang guessed you would only ever really experience at a moment like this one; the notion that everything was completely out of your hands, you had no responsibility for anything anymore, nothing you did mattered. Except that what I'm doing now matters. This matters. It's all that matters at this point; when everything else stops being important, the things you're left with become your whole world. And I'm doing it for Max. So yes, this matters.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by the voice of the whitecoat scurrying along in front of him.

'Your retirement has been scheduled to take place in two hours' time. Until then we have been given permission to run some final tests.'

Fang kept his face blank, staring at the man until he made a small sound of distress and turned back to face the front of their small cohort.

Did this change things? Did it make him feel any different now that death was hours away rather than minutes? Or that he was most likely going to be put through a whole world of pain before he died? Somehow Fang didn't think it did. He was still going to die, and he'd done pain before. To use situation-appropriate wording, he'd done pain to death. Max lived by that saying of hers – 'pain is merely a message,' she'd always said. 'You can ignore it if you try hard enough' –and it seemed to work for her. But Fang's way was different: he didn't fight it, didn't try to block it out. When he was hurt, when his body was screaming at him on all fronts, he embraced it, accepted it for what it was, and worked through it, not around it.

Fifteen minutes later, that was just what he was doing. It took a hell of a lot of concentration to open himself up to it when instinct said to fight, but he was managing. When the cool bite of the knives, not nearly as careful as they used to be now that he was slated for extermination, came calling as they cut into his back, he let the pain wash over him. Every muscle in his body was tense – that was a physical reaction he couldn't control – but slowly, as time went by, the timbre of the pain seemed to change. It seemed to turn into the kind of deep, dull burn that Fang had become used to; still aching but much easier to deal with. He was breathing deep, focussing hard on holding that sensation, when a cry from the hallway rang out as another experiment was taken past the theatre he was in. He lost his grip on the pain, giving a shout as the sharp stabbing took over, but that was suddenly far from the first thing on his mind.

Because, as impossible as it seemed that he could be hearing it now, he'd heard that cry before.

That cry had wedged itself into his brain, because it was something that he'd always been listening out for during fights, to make sure that if anything was hurting her then he'd be right there, keeping her safe.

He knew that cry.

Angel?

'Things aren't the way you think they are.'

I laughed bitterly at Jeb's words.

'Of course not. They never are, are they? Because all we are is a game to you people. You like to throw all these challenges and riddles and contradictions our way, and see if you can make us dance. So what is it this time, huh? Come on, tell me. Tell me how the woman that was my mother isn't actually evil. Tell me how you're just trying to help us, how that's what you've been doing the whole time. Tell me that none of this is real, and that unicorns exist and cheese is actually our biggest enemy. Go on, Jeb, please; I'm dying to know how your latest fairy tale goes.'

He faltered, shaking his head and looking at the ground.

'I really wish you hadn't said that.'

'And why's that?' I spat at him.

'Because I am about to tell you that your mother isn't evil, and I am about to tell you that I've been trying to help you all along.'

If Kate's hand hadn't been lying loosely on my shoulder, waiting to clamp down as soon as I made any kind of move towards Jeb, he would've been on the ground by now. It had taken a while for me to calm down enough to sit opposite him and restrain myself from ripping his face off, but now all of us were on the floor, watching him as he tried to speak.

'I know, it's absurd to try and convince you that everything isn't the way it seems to be,' he said, reading my expression perfectly, 'but what I have to tell you changes everything.'

I snorted, my fists clenching and unclenching as I imagined them pummelling him to a pulp.

'Okay, lay it on me. I'm sure we could all use a laugh before we're taken off to die.'

Jeb flinched a little at that, then scratched at the back of his neck and looked up at us.

'So you all know now that all the things you've faced have been parts of the same whole. The Doomsday Group, Itexicon, everything originated from the first School. And each branch has a slightly different "specialty", as it were. Something it has a particular focus in.

'To understand all this you need to be aware that ever since it began, the organisation known as the School worked at two different kinds of alteration: those undergone before birth, and those undergone after birth. Generation 54 subjects-' He nodded towards me and the rest of the flock. '-were all pre-natal experiments, the DNA altered whilst the embryos were still in the womb. Later subjects such as the 77 th Generation-' He looked at Kate, Ratchet, Star, and Holden. '-were all made what they are now after birth. In the area of post-natal alteration there are two focusses that branches of the School explore: physical modification and mental adjustment. You've seen the effects of the latter already.'

'The Doomsdayers,' Holden said quietly, and Jeb nodded.

'Yes, the Doomsday Group has been around for much longer than you're aware, but until recently it was very much an underground operation. It's the branch of the School that deals with research into psychological conversions – making people do things they don't want to do, causing them to believe they're someone else, creating false memories and erasing real ones. They play around with hypnosis, Pavlovian conditioning, subliminal messaging, neurological regulation… In short, mind control.'

'This is totally fascinating and all, but what does it have to do with anything?' I asked, making my voice sound bored.

Jeb looked straight at me.

'It's got everything to do with everything, Max. Your mother was one of the Doomsday Group's first test subjects. Arguably their most successful, depending on how you define it.'

A/N And onto the next chapter! It's been said that the info here is a lot to take in, so here's your chance to have a break before reading the next part of Jeb's story. :P Let me know what you think of it so far.