SEVENTEEN

The month of December was, by and large, uneventful.

By our standards, it was downright boring, actually.

Iggy followed through with his promised "see you next Tuesday" interview with Sarah, albeit via video conference. Television personalities from every genre and political party alike had something to say about Iggy's newfound place hiding behind a computer screen, calling further into questioning his legitimacy as a winged man, but Pete Davidson's "Real Life Icarus" skit on Saturday Night Live made the whole thing worth it anyway. It certainly gave the country something to argue about.

Dr. Martinez helped me navigate the enormous new world that was Actual Adulthood, since we now had legit identities and were, in fact, Actual Adults. She insisted on keeping the house and utilities in her name out of an abundance of caution, which I was smarter than to fight her on, but once our papers came in, it meant bank accounts and debit cards and formal state IDs as well as starting the never-ending paperwork that would designate me, Fang, and Iggy as the co-guardians of the younger kids.

Of all the unexpected things that came out of the month, Dr. Martinez teaching Fang and I how to drive might be the cake-taker. Why do flying birdkids need to know how to drive, you ask? Beats me!

"Broken wing," Dr. Martinez said.

"Need to blend," Fang said.

"Long trip."

"Shopping in bulk."

"Traveling with humans."

"Lightning storm."

"Gunshot wound," Dr. Martinez said pointedly.

Okay, so maybe they had a point.

I will spare you the horror story, but let's just say it is a miracle that Fang and I's relationship survived to see another day after that. For someone with a remarkably strong memory, he sure does forget his blinkers a lot.

Also, if you're over the age of eighteen and in search of a driver's license, head on over to Arizona. They hand those things out like Costco samples. Written exam, road test, fifty bucks, and congrats, you're now the proud operator of a three-thousand pound killing machine! Driver's ed who?

We had four short Zoom meetings with Leo, one for each week we were home. Mostly, they reiterated the same very basic plan: the FBI would fly us to New York on Boxing Day, where we'd meet back up with Leo, his task force, and a handful of Navy SEALs, before getting on another flight, this time to Igarka, Russia. Once there, we'd take a car (or: fly ourselves) to a US Navy military base deep in the Siberian wilderness. That's where we'd further flesh out the details of our ambush of ter Borcht.

The average high temperature in Igarka this time of year? -5F, baby! God, I just love the cold.

We did learn a whole lot during our meetings, including the little tidbit that evidently, shortly after the Vector takedown, the FBI had found and seized the School, which had all but dissolved itself anyway due to insider info about the events in Boston. That's right, folks: the School was gone.

"You are telling me," I had said once I'd processed Leo's words, trying to make my ragged voice heard over the cheering from the flock around me, "that the sadistic, twisted hellhole we spent our formative years trapped in was destroyed three years ago and nobody thought to tell us?"

"Max," Leo had said with enough earnesty that I believed him, "I genuinely thought you knew."

Aside from that, all was mostly quiet on the Befriending the Feds front. The FBI had stored away a few boxes of files they'd been able to recover from the School, although there's widespread speculation that over seventy-five percent of the documents (both electronic and paper) had been destroyed by its employees when they realized their anonymity had been compromised. The stuff they hadn't managed to get rid of was horrifying, creepy, and, maybe worst of all, vague. Vague enough that, in the setting of the ten thousand or so human experiments the School had completed in its lifetime (with only an eight percent survival rate and an average lifespan of six and a half years), it had been impossible for the government to confirm our identities based off of those documents alone. We were just drops in the ocean in the grand scheme of this thing.

No birth certificates. No DNA profiling. No fingerprints. Nothing that would've put us on any legitimate map. So, even though Leo'd had access to this information for over three years, it had done jack squat for him. We'd remained unattainable, unidentifiable question marks until the day we strolled into his office.

Leo promised to send what he could of these files via Fed-Ex. Most of it was just research notes and other science-y bullshit, but it turned out that Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel also had legitimate portfolios with details like their first names (Joy, Theodore, and Penelope), birthdates and ages (sixteen, thirteen, and—surprise!—thirteen), and parents' whereabouts (dead, dead, and dead).

It raised about, oh, I don't know, a gajillion questions about all the other "real paperwork" we'd found about us over the years: Jeb's files from back at the E-house, which were vague and had always seemed sort of illegitimate to me; the Institute stuff that we'd read around the fire that night forever ago, that had said Fang's mom was a single teenager; the Itex database that had made it look very much like Jeb had forged some signatures in order to steal us as babies.

All of that information had been staged, I realized. Like giant slices of cheddar in the ginormous maze I'd been led through years ago by Jeb and the Voice and Silas Scythe, or any evil combination of the three. That said, despite the constant inconsistencies, a few things had always been the same, like Nudge being named Monique and Gazzy and Angel being, you know, not twins. These files proved even those things had been a lie.

Or maybe these were just one big lie, too. I guess there was always that possibility. But this felt different, somehow.

It took a long time for me to wrap my mind around the twin thing, and despite all the documentation proving it, I still wasn't sure I believed it. I remembered them as little kids, watching them hit all their milestones at different times. Angel had always been ahead of schedule for hers, but she'd also always been so inherently intelligent that it made sense. When Jeb had busted us out, Angel had been so little—there's no way she could've been four years old. Right?

Right?

And if she was, had Jeb known? Had Jeb always fucking known?

A deeper dive into Gazzy and Angel's paperwork revealed that their mother had suffered from something called selective intrauterine growth restriction during her pregnancy, a condition wherein one twin receives more of a blood supply from the placenta than the other. From what we could gather, it seemed as though this is what kick-started the School's fascination with Angel's brain—as the smaller of the two, they'd expected her to have long-lasting, irreversible neurological deficits from it (spoiler: she turned out to be a mind-reading genius).

There was only so much more we could get from their files than that, since almost every piece of documentation on the two of them included the same two footnotes: see Appendix 56a and see Appendix 56b.

I'll give you three guesses as to which Appendices happened to be missing from our towering stack of papers. It was something I planned on having Leo dig up for me when we were back in DC.

Aside from that world-rocking discovery, it was also quite the coinkydink that both Gazzy and Angel's and Nudge's parents, who, based on this paperwork, had eagerly signed away their parental rights at the time of conception and generously donated their freaky, mutated newborns to the cause without so much as even holding them, were dead. Each of the kids' files had an insert with a brief blurb about their parents—names redacted, of course—which included information about their lineages, familial health histories, and, at the bottom, untimely deaths. A fatal car accident for Nudge's parents, a devastating head injury for Gazzy and Angel's mom, and a subsequent suicide by hanging for their father.

Nothing about that sat right with us. It was another thing on my To-Ask list for Leo, although I had a strong feeling he knew as much about it as we did.

"I still can't believe my real name isn't even Monique," Nudge had mumbled, reading through the AE04 folder for what surely must've been the thousandth time.

"I like Joy better," I'd told her truthfully, smoothing her hair down. "It suits you."

"So, what? My official birth certificate is gonna say 'Joy Ride?'" she'd said, sounding put-off. "Seriously?"

I'd had to bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to bleed to keep myself from laughing at that one.

"Better than Theodore," Gazzy had grumbled. "What am I, a Senator?"

The downtime also gave us an opportunity to dive deep and learn more about our Origin Story, as Gazzy has taken to calling it. Like we were about to be inducted into the Marvel Universe or something. Eat your heart out, Robert Downey Jr.!

So far, it went like this: Roland ter Borcht, on track to win the Nobel Peace Prize, was given a grant by none other than MIT to open his own branch of one of their New England Science and Technology labs after he graduated.

I'd like you to go back and read that. New England Science and Technology. NEST. I am not fucking joking.

The Nest is where he jump-started his career and eventually founded his cheekily-named "Angel Experiment," where Fang, Iggy and I were born, and where Jeb started his career as a young scientist. This lab was discovered, raided, and then unintentionally (whoops) burned to the ground in a huge sting operation by the government shortly after we came around. Jeb, bless his heart, snatched the three of us up and escaped in the nick of time. Then he brought us all the way across the country to the School, an even more top-secret lab owned by Gideon Goodchurch's company Vector that, at the time, was not doing creepy shit like fucking with embryo chromosomes or turning innocent children info wolf-people.

No. That fun stuff started a year or so later, when Silas Scythe swooped in and sprinkled his evil megalomaniac dust everywhere. He turned his back on the School entirely, allowing the scientists to do whatever the hell they wanted with no checks and balances system. Until he found out about us. The rest is history, as they say. See our previous adventure for more info.

Confused? Me, too. Maybe we'll figure it out together. Maybe we won't. I don't know what to believe anymore.

If we learned anything about the fact that the six of us had been made in two separate batches by two different people, it was that whoever was responsible for the kids found the whole process a little more personal. I was still on the fence about whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Because when it came to me, Fang, and Iggy, Leo had almost nothing of substance to send our way.

"There are the usual research documents, but not much about your origins. We think those were likely destroyed in the fire, but there's always the chance Jeb took them with him, and we've just never found them. Or I guess it's possible that they never bothered to keep track," Leo had said. "But I'll send you what I have."

We waited until it was just the three of us to unseal that particular envelope. It felt ceremonial, somehow. Iggy made a late-night brinner, complete with chocolate chip pancakes, bacon, eggs, sausage, and home fries, Fang uncorked a dusty bottle of champagne and filled three mugs to the brim, we cheers!ed, and I ripped that sucker open so fast I almost shredded it.

It turned out that what Leo "had" for us were three pieces of 8.5x11 with the New England Science and Technology Laboratories letterhead labeled AE01, AE02, and AE03.

My eyes flew over them hungrily as I read them out loud to the boys.

AE01
SEX: F
DOB: February 14
FATHER: —
MOTHER: —

AE02*
SEX: M
DOB: June 6
FATHER: Deceased
MOTHER: Deceased
*[see attached]

AE03
SEX: M
DOB: August 22
FATHER: Deceased
MOTHER: Deceased

What I assumed was the same information was written again in what looked like Russian and then possibly German underneath.

"'What's in a name?'" burst out Iggy, clutching the spatula to his chest. "'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as—'"

"Dash? Dash?" My voice was borderline hysterical. I flapped my paper in the air. "Mother: dash? What the fuck does dash mean?"

Iggy's tone was light, but his face was sympathetic. "Maybe you're a robot. Or an alien. Or—oh, wait. I've got it. Maybe the people at the Nest were just a bunch of heartless assholes."

I started laughing. Like, really laughing. Iggy and Fang exchanged a terse look, and then Fang reached over to brush my hand, but I shook my head.

"They seriously—like, they actually—they just put a dash?" I choked out, and then Iggy and Fang were laughing, too.

It had gotten to a point where I'd built up a coat of armor so impenetrable that even something like my parents' identities being listed as nonspecific symbols couldn't hurt me. Sticks and stones, I guess.

Or maybe it was the champagne.

Fang was staring at his sheet the way I stare at long division. "What do you think 'see attached' means?"

Oh, right. I leaned over his shoulder. He ran his thumb over the top corner of his paper, where it was clear a staple had existed at some point.

"There's nothing else in the envelope? Maybe I tore it off when I took it out."

He checked the envelope and shrugged. Empty. "Can't be that important if we haven't figured it out yet."

Something about that really, really didn't sit right with me, but I also knew nothing I could say would make it any better, so I just snuck a kiss on his cheek and said, "I'll ask Leo."

"Look on the bright side," he said, looking genuinely unperturbed. He popped open his laptop and fought to conceal the wide smirk that was trying like hell to surface on his face. "Your birthday's Valentine's Day."

"At least it's not D-Day," I snapped, pointing at his sheet of paper.

"Man, say what you want about the Griffithses, but I'm a little bummed they're dead," Iggy said, flipping a pancake. "Well, not bummed, but—I think they meant well."

My response was cautious, measured. "You certainly didn't think that at the time."

Iggy bobbed his head, considering this. "Well, they didn't deserve to be murdered, at least."

"They weren't." Fang typed something into his keyboard and hit enter, scrolling. "No obituaries listed for either of them."

"That doesn't necessarily mean they're not dead," I said, but I only half believed it. I leaned over Fang's shoulder to read.

Turns out they really weren't dead—at least as of three months ago. Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths had made third-page news in their local newspaper for winning the neighborhood Jack-o-Lantern-Off in October. The sheets in my hand were dated for over two decades ago, so either the Nest also did a little dabbling in phrophecies, or the Griffithses weren't Iggy's real parents.

"Jack-o-Lantern Off?" Fang smirked and cocked an eyebrow. "What kind of—"

"Scythe must've paid them off," Iggy said, frowning. He licked a dribble of pancake batter off the back of his hand as he waited for the last one to finish. "Or somebody at the School did. No way that was a coincidence. They were planted there for sure. Probably had a script and everything."

I made a mental note to ask Leo about it the next time we talked, even though I was fairly certain I'd be getting another tight frown and 'confidential' for an answer.

"Wait," Iggy said, counting on his fingers. "Am I stupid, or does that make us twenty-one already?"

I started counting on my own fingers, which were becoming suspiciously blurry the more champagne I consumed. Fang nodded. "Weird thing for them to lie about."

"My God, that means we're legal, darlings!" Iggy declared in his best Toast of Mayfair, Fräulein Sally Bowles accent. He raised his mug of champagne. "Hear, hear!"

Fang reached forward and tugged the much thicker envelope labeled NEST GENETICS – RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENT DATA — AE01-03 — 1 OF 2 toward us, running his hand over it idly. A lime green Post-It on the top said Max, Fang, Iggy — PROCEED WITH CAUTION. (SERIOUSLY) in Leo's handwriting.

"Not interested," I blurted. Fang raised an eyebrow but didn't look at me. "Not in the slightest."

"What, the one with all the experiment shit in it?" Iggy plated the last of the pancakes and I stood to help him bring the whole feast to the kitchen table. He swiped a piece of bacon off my plate and chewed noisily. I whacked him. "Me either. Sounds like fuckin' nightmare fuel to me."

Iggy and I tucked into the meal like a couple of starving lions. Fang didn't take his eyes off that envelope.

I paused with my champagne halfway to my mouth. "I'm serious, Fang. If you want to read it, be my guest, but do it somewhere else."

It's funny. A year ago, if someone had handed me a box full of information labeled SECRET SHIT FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD, READ AT OWN RISK, I'd've consumed it as eagerly as that plate of breakfast food. Right now, though, it felt like the downright last thing I ever wanted to do.

But don't you need to know? Fang's face was asking.

I drained the glass of champagne and shook my head once, hard. No. Because I didn't.

Fang shrugged, pushed the envelope away, and scooped up a forkful of eggs.

Pop!

Across the room, Iggy stood with another sputtering bottle of champagne that he'd found God knows where. "Bombs away!"

I don't remember much else about that night, to be honest.

Christmas Eve with the Martinezes came and went, a perfect sliver of peace to end our little vacation with. Ella looked at my and Iggy's mismatched dye-jobs and, without a word, went to fetch her haircutting scissors. She made his short enough that he was left with just his natural more-strawberry-than-blonde hair, but when cutting all the auburn from mine was going to leave me with a bowl cut, she begged me—and I mean begged me—to let her strip my hair of the excess dye back to the almost-light-brown-but-not-quite shade I'd been born with.

Initially, I fought her tooth and nail. For one, I didn't care. For two, the half-brunette-half-blonde look had already been immortalized by way of my license and passport photos, so the optimal time had passed. But I hadn't gotten Ella a gift, and using me as a personal plaything/science project brought her more happiness than any tangible item anyway, so I let her do her thing. I'll admit, she was right; I looked a million times better with hair that was, you know, all one color.

Dr. Martinez taught Angel her flock-famous cookie recipe, but not before Gazzy managed to eat a third of the dough. Nudge and Fang played the longest game of gin rummy known to man, and there's still no consensus as to who actually won (or as to whose rule book is regulation). Ella tried desperately to get Iggy under the mistletoe, but, surprise surprise, he was still too much of a bonehead to get out of his own way for so much as a second.

"Dude," I heard Fang say to him gruffly under his breath at one point, but Iggy just growled back at him, "Don't."

Christmas Day meant our personal flock Christmas at the house. Iggy made everything from shrimp scampi to glazed ham to enchiladas to General Gao's chicken, and we exchanged gifts late that night in the living room with full bellies and those creepy stop-motion holiday cartoons playing in the background.

Gazzy and Iggy even treated us to a very entertaining re-enactment of the songs from The Year Without a Santa Claus. It goes without saying that Gazzy's rendition of the Heat Miser song was uncanny, but let me tell you, something about Iggy as his counterpart felt downright spiritual.

"…whatever I touch—turns to snow in my clutch! I'm too much!"

"You sure are," I mumbled with a smirk. Iggy threw a giant wad of balled-up wrapping paper at my head with annoying precision.

Being the strong, hard-headed, rational leader that I am, I naturally caved and got Nudge a cell phone.

"You will keep the location tracking off at all times. You will post nothing that gives away where we are. You will absolutely, under no circumstances, bring it to Russia with us. Do you understand?"

"Oh, Max, thank you thank you thank you thank you!" She nearly decapitated Gazzy racing across the room to hug me. "It's even the one with the nice camera! Thank you thank you thank you tha—"

"Don't thank me yet," I said, laughing. "You'll be getting a job to pay for that thing, I hope you know."

Instead of pouting like a normal sixteen year old being banished to the world of part-time employment, though, she beamed. "You're gonna let me get a job, too?"

"Listen, Joy Ride—" I started, but she moaned and then rounded on a snickering Gazzy, snagging a pillow off the couch and chucking it at him.

"Shut it, Mr. Heat Blister!"

Fang and I fell into bed that night attached at the lips and grabbing desperately at each other. Everywhere he touched felt like magma under his hands, as if even my skin knew this fragile happiness was about to splinter into a million pieces.

"I love you," I said, like it was a promise.

"I love you more," he said back, like it was a prayer.

And then we forgot the world for a while.

After, I burrowed as close to him as possible, craving his warmth, his strength. Wanting nothing more than to attach myself to him so fully that it would be impossible to ever let him go.

"It was a really nice month." My voice was small—too small for the enormity of the world we were about to launch ourselves headfirst at.

Fang's fingers dusted over my shoulder. He hummed in agreement. "Wish it didn't have to end."

The wind howled outside. Fang pulled me even closer to him, clutching me too tight, like he was afraid I would disappear, like all of this would disappear, the second we boarded that plane for Russia.

"Everything's going to be okay, you know," I said quietly. I wasn't sure if it was to soothe him or me, but he nodded anyway.

I was wrong.


A/N: Welcome to your transition chapter! Thus ends part one of Like Lambs. Next stop: Russia!

I tried at one point to make it into a present-tense sort of collection of moments for their month of December, but it ended up feeling far less forced in this format.

I know the content is confusing—it is supposed to be. Realistically, the biggest takeaway for this chapter should be the fact that much of the information that has ever existed on the flock was destroyed in one way or another—in terms of the Nest, largely unintentionally due to a fire, and in terms of the School, largely intentionally by its employees when they realized the government had caught on to them. But what the flock does have is legit, and it's new territory for them.

I am certain I've still managed to fumble something, so those of you with keen eyes and brains, please hold me accountable… to an extent. Just like any story ever told (including the source material for this fic), there are bound to be plot holes, and sometimes, it is what it is, but if there's a way for me to make something clearer, I'd like to try.

There might be a bit longer of a wait on my next update as I make sure I've got everything straight for the next part of this story, but—you guys. Thank you so, so, so much for reviewing. You have made my whole month with your kind words.

Thank you, more specifically, for the constant love I get for my characterization of the flock. What made me fall in love with this series a million years ago was the six of them—their distinct personalities, their relationships with each other, their dynamic as a family. It's why I consider School's Out—Forever to essentially be the end of my personal canon... everything started to change in STWAOES, in my opinion, and then shit really went off the rails starting in TFW.

Anyway! See you on the plane to Igarka,

staph

PS: The guilt-ridden healthcare provider in me feels the need to point out for your own knowledge: it is very, very rare for fraternal twins to be monochorionic (placenta-sharing), but that is the case for Gazzy and Angel here. I almost went into deep explanation of this in this chapter but it felt really forced and unnecessary. I'm trying to get out of the habit of over-explaining things that could be seen as potential plot holes.