THIRTEEN

Sarah's smile and hot pink pantsuit were the only cheery things about the J. Edgar Hoover Building, I realized as she flashed her badge and her winning smile at what must've been the thirtieth FBI agent in ninety seconds. Realistically, I'd stopped counting after the tenth, because they were all so short, white, and ancient that they'd started to blur together. By the expressions on their faces, it was clear that she wasn't a stranger to this office—they all frowned, but let her by without so much as a peep.

"I've already set up an appointment for you," she said, all smiles and bouncing curls. A fleck of glitter from her eyeshadow had flaked off and was balanced just above her upper lip. I fought the urge to flick it off. "It's with the agent that's been heading this case for the last four years. He and I go way back. I mean—professionally, you know. Our professional relationship." She cleared her throat. "I've done press with him a million times before. He's a good one."

Before I could dive into an argument on that subject, we turned a corner to find a very tall, very tan, very important-looking man. He couldn't have been older than thirty, but he had an air of authority about him. He gave Sarah a sneaky look I couldn't quite dissect, but it made me curious as to just how professional their relationship was.

"I'll take it from here," he said.

"Are you kidding me?" Her eyes narrowed.

"Oh, c'mon," said the agent with a sorry smile. "Sensitive information, Sarah. Don't act like you actually thought I'd let you stay."

"But—!" she cried, looking crushed. "But—I—I—"

"She stays, or we go," I snarled. Okay, not the best way to establish a rapport with a federal agent, but Sarah was our protection, whether or not she realized this.

The agent, however, did. "I know exactly what you've done here, Max. You're not stupid, but neither am I. She is more than welcome to stay—" He pointed a long arm down the hall toward an unmarked, solid wood door, "—in the waiting room."

I gritted my teeth. I didn't like being defied by the kids, let alone a government official, but Sarah sighed.

"Fine, fine," she said. "Nothing gets past you, does it, LZ?"

The agent grinned and waggled his eyebrows. "You know me better than that."

Iggy cleared his throat exaggeratedly, somehow managing to enhance the awkwardness that had filled the hall.

Sarah turned, but not before I caught a glimpse of her cheeks, now almost the same color as her outfit. "I'll be here when you guys are ready," she said.

The agent led us down the hall and opened the very last door on the right, stepping back to gesture us all in. There were six chairs lined up opposite his own, the wide expanse of his solid mahogany desk in the middle.

My skin was threatening to crawl right off my body. The panic, hot and thick, sludged through my bloodstream. Suddenly, taking the step over the threshold seemed like the hardest thing I could ever possibly do.

"Hey," Fang said almost silently. I looked up at him. He gave me a reassuring half-smile, the one he kept just for me. He reached his hand over and I grasped it for dear life. Then we stepped together.

"I'm Agent Leonardo Zanetti," the agent said once we'd all found our seats. "You can call me Leo."

"Ayyyy!" Gazzy yelled in a very convincing The Godfather accent. "A-Lee-yo!"

A pregnant silence filled the room at this. Leo cringed visibly.

"Maybe not like that," he said grimly. "Can I, uh, get you guys anything? Water, coffee?"

"No bullshit, no pleasantries," I said, putting my palms flat on his desk and leaning toward him. I'd had this conversation a thousand different ways in my head, had talked myself in circles, and was ready for it to be behind me. "Why is my face on a wanted poster, and what do you want from me?"

Leo gave me his winningest smile—which, to be fair, was pretty winning—and reached a hand out to shake.

"You're not in trouble. Nothing's wrong. We've just—we've been looking for you. We want to help you."

I stared stupidly down at his extended hand. Two seats to my right, Iggy burst into uproarious laughter.

"You're kidding," he managed between guffaws. "Leo—my man—"

"No jokes," he said. A blush crept to his cheeks. "There's a reason there's no big to-do, no fanfare, no cameras. We have no interest in anything but a helping, symbiotic relationship with you all."

"You want to help us," I said flatly. "As in—you don't want to imprison us."

"Help you," he repeated, nodding. "Not experiment on or lock up or anything else. Help. Well, actually, more honestly… we want you to help us."

A long pause filled the space between us as I tried to turn that sentence into something that made sense. The federal government wanted... our help?

Next to me, I knew Fang had to be near to bursting with questions. Even though his days as the nonverbal emo boy were long gone, he still had trouble using his words sometimes.

Thankfully, I was enough of a blubbering loudmouth for the both of us.

"Hang on, hang on." I played Leo's words back through my head. "If you wanted our help, you should've included that on the freaking 'wanted' flyer," I said through gritted teeth.

"Oh?" Leo narrowed his eyes. "You're going to tell me that if that flyer had said come help us, we don't bite! that you would've strolled on in here willingly?"

Iggy, still chuckling, wiped tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. "You're a perceptive one, aren't you, Mr. DiCaprio?"

"Zanetti," he corrected kindly, noticing a moment too late that Iggy was being a facetious asshole. This made Iggy snicker even more.

"Not that perceptive," Gazzy amended.

"Why now?" I demanded. There was no way I'd come all the way here for this—I needed answers. "If this is about what I think it's about, then it's been three years."

"We've known about you for a long time, as I'm sure you know. Bits and pieces, anyway. Enough to be pretty certain that it wasn't just hearsay. The only reason we actively started searching was because we found some definitive evidence."

"Definitive evidence? What about four years ago, when you guys cornered us in the hospital after Fang almost bled out and died?" I snapped.

"Well, let me back up a few steps," he said, hands out in a placating gesture. "Let's start with the poster."

I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of, I'll be asking the questions, bucko!, but Fang's hand found my knee and squeezed. His polite way of saying maybe chill the hell out for a second.

"The idea was that somebody would recognize you, and we'd at least be able to get you in here. We knew you'd be defensive, maybe even combative, but our plan was to immediately make it clear that we were on the same team," said Leo. My task force had zero expectation that you'd show up here willingly."

"Say that played out the way you expected it to. You probably would've been taking us by force, against our wills." He kept his face blank, waiting me out, but I suspected he knew where I was going. "Would that have held up in court, Agent Zanetti?"

He pressed his lips together so tightly that they only formed a pale pink line on his face. The look he gave me was so earnest that I almost had to look away.

"We've never wanted to lock you up," he said instead of answering. "Quite the contrary. Learn about you? Sure. If you let us. But imprison you? No."

I thought about three years ago, when Ari had literally shot me in order to ground me so I'd listen to what he had to say. Clearly, I didn't have a great track record in terms of being a good listener. But I was trying, sincerely trying.

What Leo didn't didn't seem to realize that not only had I already had this touchy-feely-we-wanna-be-friends conversation before, but I also already knew exactly how it ended.

All of this might as well have been written in Sharpie on my forehead, apparently, because Leo said, "Anne went to jail for what she did, Max. So did that entire branch of hers. Their intentions started out pure, but in the end, they were paid off by Silas Scythe. Blackmailed and threatened. They were all Vector."

This wasn't out of left field; I'd suspected it. But to hear it confirmed, and from the FBI no less, felt huge, somehow.

"I knew it," said Iggy.

"Jail?" Fang said skeptically.

"Jail," Leo said, nodding. "All of them were working closely with a man named Jeb Batchelder, who managed to evade the legal system. Not that it made much of a difference. But I'm sure you already know what became of both of them."

We locked eyes. I wasn't sure how much to trust him just yet, and I wasn't sure how much they already knew. Presumably, they'd found Jeb and Anne's bodies, or at least traces of DNA, in the ruins of Vector, along with evidence of Silas Scythe and a plethora of Vector employees. But did they know about the School? About Itex? The Institute? Did they find cabinets and cabinets of paper files to sift through? What about the computers?

I glared at Leo. What do you know? He didn't take the bait.

"Scythe told me Vector was government-protected," I said.

He nodded patiently. "Like I said: by Anne Walker."

"So what you're saying is that the connection between the government and Vector…"

More patient nodding. "Was isolated to Anne's corrupt branch, yes. The rest of the Bureau—all the way to the top—was in the dark." He paused a moment and cleared his throat before lowering his voice. "As far as we know."

There were good signs. For one, nobody was coercing us to do anything. Leo seemed to genuinely want to work with us. I couldn't detect any cameras in the room.

I turned to my right and studied my flock.

Angel, I asked in my mind, knowing it was an absolute long shot that she'd answer—she hadn't been able to tap into somebody else's brain in years. Is he a good guy?

She knew I was trying to communicate with her but only offered a contemplative look back.

I hadn't looked at Fang during any of this, mostly because I already knew he was likely glaring daggers into me; I'm sure it was plain on my face that I was considering trusting this guy. I'd never get off his shitlist for showing Jamie my wings. He obviously thought my judgment was unraveling at a rapid pace.

But he'd agreed to come, hadn't he? To at least hear what they had to say, he'd said.

For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe that's genuinely all he'd ever intended to do.

"Give me one reason I should trust you," Fang said to Leo.

Leo reached under the desk. I tensed, threw my arms out in front of the flock, and moved to lunge at him, but stopped immediately when I realized what he was doing. From his drawer, he produced a small handgun. He then reached behind him and pulled one presumably from the waistband of his pants. Finally, he stood, crossed the room, and pulled another from a filing cabinet in the corner. He placed all three of them on his desk and pushed them in front of him with his palms to the ceiling.

"Because they're after us now," he said with a pleading look at Fang. Then he looked at me. "They're coming after the United States of America."

Ooooh, spooky, right? As if nobody has ever come after the United States of America before. I'm looking at you, Soviet Russia.

"We don't know for sure what he has at his disposal, but we have intel that there could be more hybrids like you. Or worse."

Iggy gasped. "Gosh, worse than us?"

"That's not what I mean," Leo said hurriedly.

"We know what you mean," Fang said, waving his arm as if swatting a fly away. "My question is what you want us to do about it. We're not weapons. We don't exist just to be used."

"You're absolutely right. We're not using you—we're asking you. Humbly. As the United States Government."

They were asking us for help. These people we'd hidden from our entire lives, people we were certain were out to get us—they were asking us for help.

"What do you even want us to do?" Nudge asked. "We don't have, like, laser vision or anything."

"And there's no way our bombs are as good as yours," Gazzy said dejectedly. My jaw dropped and I glared heatedly at him as if to say, Maybe don't incriminate us at a time like this.

Leo, though, just cracked a smile. "We didn't think so. But you're smart, and you understand these people in a way we don't. You're strong. You can fly. I'm sure there are lots of other things that we're not privy to." He raised his eyebrows, but I kept my face flat. "With your help, we think we can actually take this on, close the case on the recombinant project hopefully forever."

"Have you tried, oh, I don't know—the Army?" I asked.

"Max."

"The Navy?"

"Max."

"The Coast Guard, even."

Leo sighed and looked at his desk, rubbing his temples with his fingers. "It feels like you're not really grasping the magnitude of the situation."

I'll admit it—I kinda lost my shit at that.

"Excuse me?"

"Oh no," Gazzy whispered.

Next to him, Iggy whistled lowly. "Yikes."

"Trust me, Agent Zanetti. I am very much grasping the magnitude of the situation. In fact, I've been grasping it for nineteen years."

"Wait, what are we grasping?" Nudge whispered from behind me.

"We've been on the run from them since the day we escaped! We thought we finished it once and for all three years ago! All that was left to hide from, funnily enough, was you!"

"Then you should be the first to understand exactly what we're dealing with," Leo said back gently. "Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think even a militia of human men with guns could handle this, do you?"

We'd reached the point where I wasn't totally sure what we were arguing about, or whether or not we were actually arguing at all. In the simplest terms, I was freaking pissed, which meant that a lot of rationality had gone out the window.

"Max, he's right," Angel said quietly, eyes wide in her face. "You know he's right. We have to work together on this. This is the end of it."

I felt myself deflate like an old tire at this.

"How many times are we going to say that?" I said exasperatedly. I felt tears prick at the corners of my eyes and forced them away.

Fang, who'd been staring at me intently, turned his attention to Leonardo. "We still don't know what the threat is. You said 'he' earlier. That you don't know what 'he' has at his disposal. Who is 'he?'"

And then, of all the ominous things that could ever fucking possibly happen: there was a knock at the door.

All six of us were up in an instant, slightly crouched, fists ready to start punching. Leo held up a hand and eyed us nervously, calling out to whoever was just behind the door, "Just a minu—"

But the door opened anyway. I jerked to get up, but Fang was quicker than me, nearly on top of the figure entering the room in seconds, his angel-of-death wings twitching against his back. His body language was taut, murderous—until it wasn't.

"Well, excuse me," said a small but decidedly angry voice.

"Fang?" I asked nervously.

He looked back at me, hilariously confused more than anything, and stepped to the side, gesturing vaguely to the figure in front of him.

She was old and impossibly small—shorter than Angel by at least a few inches—and she was dressed in mismatching floral patterns and balancing a similarly mismatched floral plate covered in brownies atop a thick, leather-bound notebook. Her gray hair fell in a curly bob at her cheeks. Her eyes were green and perceptive as they narrowed irritatedly, but decidedly not fearfully, at Fang.

In fact, she hadn't cowered half an inch from him, something that weirdly silenced every alarm bell in my head.

"You didn't tell me they'd be hostile, Leonardo," she snapped.

Leo's mouth split into an uneven smile that he'd clearly tried to suppress.

"Sorry, Ms. Goodchurch," he said shyly.

Uh.

Huh?

"Gideon's mom?" Nudge blurted, obviously somehow freakishly connecting the old woman in front of her to the password she'd gleaned from Gideon's laptop three years ago. She turned back to face Leo, hitching a thumb over her shoulder at our new guest. "What does she have to do with anything?"

Her irritated gaze jumped from Fang to Nudge.

"My good Lord," she muttered, shaking her head as she hobbled towards us. "No manners. I guess Silas did get his hands on you, didn't he?"

I was startled into offense. "Excuse me?"

Laura Goodchurch noisily grabbed a chair from the corner of the room, dragged it to my left, plopped into it. She placed the book and brownies onto Leo's desk in a huff.

"Well, then." She pulled off her glasses and cleaned the lenses, one by one, with her cotton shirt. After fixing them back on her face, she peered at me. "You must be Max."

"I—" My jaw was cemented to the floor. I looked to Fang for help, but he looked just as lost as I felt.

Blessedly, Leo cleared his throat and cut in.

"Ms. Goodchurch, this is Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel. You may know them better as the Angel Experiment kids," he said, gesturing to each of us. "And all of you—this is Ms. Laura Goodchurch."

"Okay, so," Iggy said, looking ready to hit someone, "And I mean this with the utmost respect, but what the f—"

I reached over and smacked him, needing for this woman to stay and tell us what the hell was going on.

"She's desperate to get to the bottom of her son's disappearance," Leo finished.

Ms. Goodchurch made a high pitched noise of disbelief, opening the notebook in front of her. At the top of the impressively sized stack of papers was that very same photo the New York Times had published of me, clearly printed from the still of a video.

I'd been dangling dangerously since my grip on reality had started slipping two hours ago, but this was about to grease the ledge.

Fang was about fifteen steps ahead of me. "You gave them the photo of Max from the restaurant," he said to Laura harshly.

"I had to find you," she said quietly. With this, her voice lost the feisty-grandma tone and wrapped itself around something else altogether: devastation. "It's the only way to figure out what happened to my son."

I felt my heart lurch at that, and immediately I understood. I thought of the five people to my right, of what I would do to protect them, to find them. To give them a proper burial, if it ever came to it.

Anything. I'd do anything.

But I certainly couldn't let that crippling train of thought go on any longer. I got on a different one.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. So you want—wait." I paused, rewinded. "Did you say 'disappearance?'"

She nodded, giving me a challenging look, daring me to defy her, and I became acutely aware that there was a chance I was the only person in the room who could say with complete certainty that Gideon Goodchurch was dead. Which meant I would likely be the first person to tell his mother that her son had been murdered.

Because of me.

"Ms. Goodchurch, your… your son is dead," I said, feeling like I might choke on the words. "Someone from your son's company murdered him and Marion Rodgers at her home three years ago. Both of them were shot. I was there."

Ms. Goodchurch, of all things, scoffed.

"And you saw this?"

"Yes," I said. I crammed that PTSDfest right back on into the little box I'd been keeping it in for the foreseeable future.

"Let me ask again. You saw, with your own eyes, these people shoot and kill my son?"

"I—"

I stopped and let a slice of the memory back out of the box, processing it. I looked at Ms. Goodchurch again, trying to figure out how to tell her that while no, I had not watched the bullet enter Gideon's body, I had heard the shot and the guttural sound that accompanied it.

"No," I said cautiously. "But—"

"Well, that's because he's not dead, dear," she said. She opened her folder back up, this time reaching for something clipped to the inside of the cover: an envelope, stamped and addressed to her in frantic handwriting.

She jutted her chin in my direction as if to say, Open it.

So I did, pulling out a small, torn scrap of paper with three words written on it:

HELP

SEND MAX

The words were shaky and had clearly been scribbled quickly, but there was no question as to what they were.

Fang took the envelope from my hand and scrutinized it carefully.

"How can we even be sure this is from him?" Fang pressed, but Nudge was already reaching over Iggy and motioning with her fingers for Fang to fork the envelope over. The second it touched her hands, she gasped and nodded.

"He wrote it, all right," she murmured. She closed her eyes and I watched as she was transported elsewhere in that scary way. This skill of hers was unique, but it was very helpful in the right circumstances.

Gideon Goodchurch was alive.

And apparently thought I was the one who could save him.

"Wherever he is, he's hurt," she said. Next to me, Ms. Goodchurch rose to her feet and picked her way around chairs to get closer to Nudge. "It's dark. It kinda looks like one of those old-timey prison cells." She sat in silence for a moment more before shaking her head and opening her eyes. "That's all I can get."

Ms. Goodchurch had knelt next to Nudge and now took one of her hands in her own, her face a rainbow of emotions, her body language defeated. All traces of the feisty woman who'd greeted us dissolved like a wisp of smoke in the stuffy air of the room.

"I knew it," she said quietly. "I knew it."

This was all fine and good. Heartwarming, even, if it weren't for the fact that her leather-bound binder tipped off the desk just then, vomiting loose leaf papers all over the floor. I bent quickly to collect them and froze.

A faded newspaper clipping had drifted halfway under Agent Zanetti's desk; it was a birth announcement, complete with the unflattering newborn photo. But the headline is what forced the corners of my vision to get fuzzy and black. My arm shot out and grasped the edge of the desk to steady me before I even registered it happening.

I must've made some sort of noise, because Fang reached an arm down to pull me back upright and Gazzy was said, "Max?"

I couldn't peel my eyes from the clipping. "What—what is…"

Roland & Laura proudly announce the birth of their son, Gideon Michael ter Borcht!

A/N: to pancakes-for-you (and anyone else who may have been wondering): no, the blog is not a part of this universe. I should've addressed this in Like Lions; but I honestly kind of forgot how decent of a portion it plays in SOF.

In other news, I just finished a reread of STWAOES. Man, what an absolutely bogus piece of literature that is. It brings me back to reading it for the very first time and feeling totally shocked at what had happened to these books I loved so much. To be fair, this was also over 10 years ago, so.

As I plunge on into the Final Warning, I'm realizing more and more that it might be hard for a lot of readers to remember what the plot is for only the first two books. I effectively stopped paying attention after School's Out Forever; you could truly put a gun to my head and I couldn't tell you in any detail what happens after the final warning, and even that I'm pretty hazy on.