ELEVEN
Due to my marathon of sleep the day before, I was the first one awake in the morning, even before Fang. I wiggled out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweatpants, weighing the risks and benefits of heading down to the lobby to stock up on breakfast foods.
I sighed. What a way to live.
I snuck a kiss on Fang's cheek.
"I'll be right back," I whispered. His eyes opened, laden with sleep but alert. An answer to his unasked question was already leaving my lips: "Just to get breakfast. Yes, I know, I'll be careful."
This early, the entire lobby and dining area was totally deserted. The girl manning the front desk was too interested in her cell phone and her chewing gum to notice me, so I filled my backpack liberally with muffins, bagels, mini cereal boxes, and cartons of milk and juice. I loaded a plate up with as much bacon and eggs as I could carry for good measure and scurried back up to the room.
Back upstairs, I dropped my spoils on Fang and I's desk and crept into the girls' room, satisfied to find them still sleeping soundly. Iggy and Gazzy's room, on the other hand, seemed to smell faintly of char. I barged in without knocking and two very guilty faces swiveled around to look at me.
"Max!" Gazzy yelped. "Knock much?"
"Considering it smells like you're about to burn the place down and I'm one stroke of bad luck from a limited-series Netflix special, no, Gazzy, I do not knock much." I tried to peer around them, but they were huddled protectively around their experiment. "I'm serious, guys! We are trying to be—"
"Inconspicuous," they monotoned back at me.
"Relax, Max," Iggy continued on, sounding bored. "He's got adult supervision right here."
"Oh, well in that case, I feel much better." I elbowed my way by the two of them and managed to catch a glimpse at an almost-definitely-explosive contraption. "Absolutely not! No bombs in motels."
"It's not a bomb," Gazzy said, heavily implying that it was likely something else incriminating.
"Nothing with that many red wires in motels, then!" When neither of them moved, I tried a different approach: "I went down and got breakfast. Go shove your faces and stop poking that thing, please."
Before I even finished the sentence, they were hustling to their feet, chatting loudly in engineering terms I did not, and did not want to, understand.
"Quietly!" I hissed, tailing them through the door. "Everyone's still—"
"Asleep?" Fang finished, smirking. I'd almost walked into him. He was bright-eyed despite just waking up and gestured to the breakfast spread I'd procured, which had been relocated to the girls' dresser. Angel and Nudge had already dug in, Angel looking content, Nudge looking every single one of her sixteen years.
"Would've loved to have slept in, dad," growled Nudge. The glower she gave Fang could have melted tungsten.
Fang gave a cheesy grin back with two thumbs up, a rare, room-warming display of goofiness from him, but Nudge just rolled her eyes in response.
"We're going to get more food," Gazzy announced. Iggy swiped a keycard off the table and the two of them disappeared out the door before I could even beg them to be safe.
Angel patted the bed next to her, offering me a muffin and a carton of orange juice. I sat cross-legged and ate thoughtfully; Fang was tapping away at the keys of his laptop yet again at the desk on the other side of the room.
"Sleep well?" she asked after a few moments of silence.
I nodded. "Guess I didn't realize how tired I was."
"Nothing wrong with a good night's sleep. You must've really needed it."
I smiled at her, remembering a time when I was the one comforting her, the days when she relied on me for everything. They were long gone now—at eleven years old, Angel was the youngest, sure, but she was by no means a baby anymore. Between her height and her maturity, and with the right outfit and hairdo, she could easy pass for a teenager.
"Well, you're looking awfully nostalgic," Nudge commented, plopping down to sit on the floor in front of us. At some point in the last few minutes, she'd changed out of her pajamas and put on a face of makeup, looking ready to have a totally normal day of adolescence. As in not running from the law to stay out of a cage for the rest of her life.
"Oh, you know," I said wistfully, gesturing vaguely toward Angel.
The boys returned with even more bacon, eggs, and pastries. We inhaled our meal in silence for a moment before Gazzy said between mouthfuls of muffin, "So what's the plan, then?"
"I don't know what the right answer is," I admitted to them. "But this is something that will impact our lives forever if we don't figure it out."
There were a few nods across the room. Iggy's fork was halfway to his mouth; he was eyeing me warily.
Nudge, who had finished breakfast, was starting to re-organize her backpack. Our game of Bring It or Fling It was only days ago, somehow.
"Or die trying," she added, but not unkindly.
"Maybe speak for yourself on that one, GI Jane," Iggy said tightly.
"I'm serious," she said sharply. A piece of her fluffy hair broke free of her ponytail and stuck to her lip. She blew it away noisily. "I'm sick of this shit, and I want it to be over."
"Me too. I miss our life," Gazzy said.
"What, exactly, does 'figuring it out' entail?" Iggy asked.
"I'm not sure yet. But getting a little bit closer to the problem seems like a good first step," I offered.
Iggy, still narrow-eyed, chose his words carefully. "I'm willing to do a little more… research. But I'm not so sure I'm ready to storm the Capitol."
Gazzy rolled his eyes and then yawned exaggeratedly.
"Already been done, dude," he said. "Already been done."
I'll spare you the details of our relocation to DC in an attempt to not get too repetitive, as it was largely the classic same shit, different day trope that even us mutant freaks can fall into. The flight was short, but not short enough for me to not want to throttle Gazzy for singing the Star-Spangled Banner for most of the trip.
"Isn't most of this airspace protected? As in like, no-fly?" Iggy had pointed out, as if I hadn't considered this glaringly obvious fact and mapped out our path accordingly.
"Why do you think I'm singing the National Anthem?" Gazzy had said in a tone that implied profound stupidity on Iggy's part. "This is why the aliens have got it all wrong. As long as you bleed the red, white, and blue, you're safe around these parts. Unless you have x-ray vision, of course."
Iggy looked caught off-guard. A rarity. "Literally none of that is true."
"O-kay." Gazzy rolled his eyes. "Whatever you say."
We found yet another dingy motel, which was significantly more difficult in the area surrounding the nation's capital. It was nightfall by the time we were settled in and were able to rehash our plan, surrounded by subs and potato chips.
It went something like this:
We needed to know what the government wanted from us. More than likely, yes, it was to stick us in cages. We were 50/50 on whether they thought we were a threat or they thought we were a cool science project, but it the consensus that none of it was without risk. There was still the question of their involvement with and/or understanding of Vector—the company had turned out to be the center of the very complicated, intricate web that was our lives.
There were other possibilities, though, that I forced everyone to consider that were met with varying levels of acceptance.
The overarching theme of "other possibilities" was that maybe they wanted to meet us but not stick us in cages. There was obviously data on us, or at the very least speculation. Of course Homeland Security would want to meet any other sentient being that it couldn't explain with its own science.
Inspired by Gazzy's airspace rationale earlier, I brought forth a discussion about if humanity were to encounter aliens, since aliens were the closest feasible thing I could compare us to (what a positively bonkers sentence). Would the US government stick them in cages and imprison them? Would it depend on the level of threat? Would it depend on their intelligence? Their power?
This turned out to be an exceptionally stupid idea, and far too abstract for a group of K-12 dropouts to wrap their heads around. Iggy, in particular, who had apparently made up his mind, was furious that I was even entertaining idea other than to simply hide.
"Moot point," Iggy argued, shoving his hand into the bag of Doritos at his hip, "because they'd never tell the general public what they were doing."
"The aliens, or the government?"
"Both."
"Tons of companies have approved testing on animals," Angel said. She was perched on the edge of the ratty couch. "What makes us any different?"
I recoiled a bit at that statement, peering into her sad eyes and wishing more than anything that she didn't feel compelled to equate herself to an animal.
"We're sentient, honey," I said gently.
"So are fish," Iggy said snidely.
"We're intelligent."
"So are gorillas," Gazzy chimed in.
"Okay," I said, having a surprisingly hard time finding a method to differentiate us from gorillas. "We can communicate. We have languages."
"Orcas have their own dialects by pod," Nudge said. "And think about all the ones in captivity, oh, God, remember when we watched Blackfish?"
Iggy snorted around a mouthful of chips. "Yeah, there definitely should've been a trigger warning on that. May not be suitable for viewing by children or recombinant lifeforms formerly kept in captivity. I can feel my metaphorical dorsal fin wilting just thinking about it," he said hotly.
My last shred of patience flitted into the wind like a dandelion tuft.
"Guys! Seriously. Please." At my tone, they stopped speaking immediately, and I had to resist the urge to give a speech about side-stepping me again. "Listen. We can speak for ourselves. We can stand up for ourselves. Why do I need to remind you guys that we are human? Stop thinking of yourselves as animals. Yeah, we grew up in a lab. Yeah, we might've come from test tubes. But we are people."
Angel gave a little half-smile, and I felt my empty cup fill up at least to half.
"Yeah, people that the government tried domesticating once before, and it turned out to be a totally evil plot to fuck with our heads," Iggy muttered darkly.
I ignored him.
"We've returned to every lab we can think of, have tackled every bad guy that we've faced, but our biggest enemy has always been the fact that we aren't even technically real citizens of this country. We've been hiding from people we don't even know that we should fear. And now they have my face on a Wanted poster, and I need to know why."
The silence that followed was almost painful. Five pairs of eyes stared at me with different emotions behind them.
"Max," Iggy said curtly, ears red. "This is fucking crazy."
"Are… are you sure?" said Nudge.
I waited for Fang to say something, anything, but as much as I hated it, he knew better. When we'd officially become an item, the flock seemed to believe that any time we were on the same side in an argument, we'd planned it. It couldn't be further from the truth, since Fang and I disagree on more things than I can count, but in a situation like this, Iggy would've blown his top if Fang started getting preachy.
None of that ended up mattering, though, because the voice that broke the silence was what I truly needed to hear.
Angel.
"I think we need to try it."
Angel, who'd been so reserved for so long. Angel, who'd sacrificed so much in return for so little. Angel, who had every single reason to fear humanity as a whole.
Angel, who wanted to take the biggest risk of all.
A very different wave of silence settled over us.
Iggy looked close to detonating like one of his bombs. "What?"
"Angel—" Gazzy started, but she cut him off.
With her hands on her hips and a pout on her face, I got a glimpse of the girl I used to know; a girl who learned her stubbornness from none other than moi. And I'll be honest—it made me so damn proud.
"No, don't 'Angel' me, Gazzy. Max is right."
"Are—" Iggy started, but she trudged on.
"We've tried everything, haven't we? Does anybody else have any brilliant ideas? Besides run and hide forever, because I think we already went over that one."
I looked reflexively at Fang, but his eyes were glued to Angel. Iggy was purple.
"Are you—"
"We haven't even given them a chance to mess up yet."
"What?" Iggy was incredulous. "Where do we even start? First of all, Anne—"
"That was different."
"How?" Iggy threw his hands up. "Are you out of your fucking mind, Angel?"
"Hey!" Gazzy said in warning to Iggy, eyes narrowed. Always his sister's keeper, that one.
"Do we even know she was really a bad guy, Iggy?" Angel said furiously. "Think of how nice she was to us! She tried! Who knows if any of that was even her fault? We—"
"Jeb told us she was his boss!" Iggy interjected. "Think about what you're saying!"
In my head, I was replaying every minute of that last day with her that I could remember. We'd made it out of that high school by the skin of our teeth and circled back to Anne's to rescue Total. I remembered so clearly Ari's fury, so passionate, for reasons I couldn't understand. I remembered Anne telling Jeb he was out of bounds, that she was in charge of us, and Jeb had told her she was "ruining us" because I was a soldier, and an expensive one at that. I remembered my own anger and the hurt that came with it, once again grappling with the fact that someone else had screwed us over.
Jeb had fed me some bullshit about the world being a maze yet again—bullshit that present day I knew was nothing but gaslighting at its finest. And boy, had it worked.
But Anne… Anne had looked upset. Truly, deeply upset. She'd looked like the mother she'd wanted to be, nearly had been, until all of it had blown up in her face right then.
Don't get it twisted—I haven't lost a single wink of sleep over any of that—but in retrospect, I hadn't exactly stuck around to hear anything more one way or the other. About any of it.
That past version of Max felt like an entirely different person from an entirely different timeline. There was a deep rabbit hole somewhere that I could dive into, ruminating on all the things I could learn from her, but I didn't have weeks' worth of existential dread time to carve into my already near-to-bursting schedule.
Which meant I also didn't have time for the ugly, invasive mental images of the moment Silas Scythe shot them in front of me that were rushing to the forefront of my mind.
Shut it out, shut it out, shut it out.
"This is fucking bogus," Iggy seethed.
"No it's not, Iggy!" Tears of frustration glistened in Angel's eyes.
"Have you learned nothing, Angel?" he roared, standing to his full height and towering over her darkly. "How many times do they have to take you from us? How many times do they have to fucking traumatize you for you to get it through your thick fucking head?"
Hot-headed Iggy, who was notoriousfor saying terrible things he didn't mean when he was angry, had crossed a line, and the flock reacted accordingly.
Angel shrunk back. Nudge's jaw dropped. Gazzy, looking near to angry tears, screamed, "Stop!"
Fang grabbed Iggy roughly by the bicep and growled at him, "What the fuck is the matter with you?"
"Okay, okay, okay!" I cut in. "Iggy, back off. Angel—it's okay. Everything is fine. Can everyone—can we just take a second here?"
Angel looked half a second from a breakdown. Iggy's face was maroon. I had a strong feeling that I wouldn't be able to get through to him, not on something this deeply ingrained in us. The distrust was so profound that it had to have seeped into our DNA, at this point, and it ran even deeper for him because they'd blinded him.
I also had a strong feeling that I wanted to grind his face against a hot car hood in August for the talked to Angel, but I prioritization was key, here, and I knew his willingness to stay involved in this conversation was fading fast.
I looked up at my flock, all of whom seemed floored by both Angel's sudden talkativeness and Iggy's temper tantrum.
"I'm done talking. I'm done waiting. I'm done with all of it. At the very core of it, this comes down to me, and it always has. No!" I pointed an accusatory finger at all of them—because every one of them had opened their mouths to counter me. "You know what I mean. This is not the 'woe is me, I'm to blame' crap, it's the reality of it. It was always, 'Max needs to save the world,' 'Max needs to run through the maze,' 'Max needs to discover the meaning of life.' It never involved everyone. Maybe by proxy, but it was always all directed at me.
"I love each and every one of you with every cell of my being. I am so grateful for you staying by my side. But I am not forcing anybody to do anything. You all know I'd do anything to keep us all together, always, but what I will not do is expect any of you to do something you don't believe in. We've been doing this for too damn long to ask anything more of you than you've already given."
This speech cast a deafening silence over the room. Fang gave a little nod in my direction, indicating that I'd, at the very least, strung together a cohesive thought. I allowed myself to exhale.
"So what happens if we don't say yes?" Iggy fumed. "What then? We call the whole thing off? You really think this isn't just another case of what Max says goes?"
"You should know me better than that, Iggy."
"Oh, I like to think I know you pretty damn well, Max," he spat.
"Max," Nudge said with a nervous glance toward Iggy. "What Iggy means is—we're all confused. We're all gonna stall until the cows come home, because we're scared. We hate this. We know you do too. But we're not leaving you, no matter what."
"Never," Gazzy agreed.
Angel was nodding, Fang was steadfast.
But there was one person left whose approval I constantly sought but did not always receive, and it was six foot five with red roots under a quickly-fading auburn dye-job and viciously, murderously angry at the entire world for what it had done to him.
And he was taking it out on us.
"What Iggy means is," Iggy said, jaw tight, bones rigid, "that you all can speak for yourselves. You're out of your fucking minds if you think I'm strolling up to Quantico with my hands up. And you're all out of your fucking minds for even considering it. I'm out."
You know that swirly-headed, fading-lights feeling you get when something absolutely devastating and unexpected happens? Maybe for you normal people it's hearing that a family member died suddenly and unexpectedly, or realizing your engagement ring fell off in the wave pool at the water park, or hydroplaning in the middle of a torrential downpour on the freeway?
I fought against every shred of impending insanity, white-knuckling the loveseat next to me and setting my mouth in a thin line.
Get a grip, get a grip, get a grip, grip, grip, I hummed to myself. The panic attack was poised, waiting to strike. Get a GRIP, Max.
Fang's intense eyes were darting from me to Iggy, his mouth moving, his face tight. Nudge was at his back, grabbing his shoulders, her face distressed and pleading as he shoved belongings into his pack. Gazzy was pale-faced and agape, still just as confused as I was. And Angel was crying.
Frozen to my spot, I watched Fang approach Iggy and clap a hand on his shoulder, roughly forcing eye contact between the two of them. Fang said something murderously, his face a picture of controlled rage. Iggy yelled something back. They were all still just Charlie Brown's teacher. Muffled sounds.
Without a look back, Iggy stormed out the door of the motel. Nudge was hot on his heels. Fang wasn't far behind them. He cast two fingers behind his back in my direction. Wait.
Gazzy sat slack-jawed on the armchair. Angel looked at me helplessly.
"Max," she croaked. "I'm sorry."
It's not your fault, I wanted to say. It's not you, it's him, I wanted to say. But instead I eyed the door myself, thinking of the fire exit down the opposite hall.
I needed to explode. To totally lose my shit. But for Angel's sake (and by for Angel's sake I mean for my own sake), I needed to do that somewhere that wasn't here.
"Listen to me very closely." My voice was the steady, no-bullshit tone I reserved for the most serious of situations. "I am not running off. I am not freaking out. I do not, under any circumstances, need to be saved. I am not doing something rash." I held up my cellphone. "You have my phone number. I will be back. They are not far and will be back soon, I can smell them." I was pretty sure Iggy wouldn't be coming back, but I wasn't about to say that. "Stay put. Tell Fang to just give me a minute. Do you understand?"
Angel choked on a sob and searched my eyes for the truth I begged she saw there. "Yes," she whispered.
"Do you believe me?"
She didn't hesitate: "Yes."
This was a testament to one of three things on my part, or maybe a cocktail of them all: 1) I had come a long way from the static-cling days and had gained some faith in the kids to protect themselves and make intelligent decisions; 2) I had some shred of trust left in the world; 3) I was finally, actually, and whole-heartedly losing my fucking marbles.
But I couldn't think too hard about it—not without really wanting to jump headfirst off a cliff with my wings bound tight to my back and break every single promise I'd just made to Angel—so instead I grabbed my baseball cap from my backpack, tucked my ponytail up into it, and walked out the door, down the hall, and onto the streets of Washington DC.
A/N: Guys, I wrote one of the last scenes of this today and I am so dang excited for where this ends. It's just a matter of me, you know, writing the entire middle part. Hopefully there's at least someone still reading who will make it worth my while?
I have a couple more chapters already written after this and am trying to find my way through the rest. Let me know if you're still reading
-staph