EIGHTEEN
Fang was really sick of airplanes.
Sighing, he looked down at his suitcase. Maroon. Hard-shell. Snappy but sensible. Could've belonged to a middle aged businesswoman. When he'd let it slip during their last supply run that he'd only packed his backpack for their trip to Russia, Max had come distressingly close to a meltdown in the store, despite the fact that he was a grown adult more than capable of taking care of himself. He'd lived the better part of his life out of a backpack; being escorted somewhere with running water by the government and military of a first world country? Child's play.
Normally, the anxiety in her eyes would've been enough to smother whatever stubborn flame in him flickered at her fretting. But the anxiety was in him, too, ensnaring his better judgment like lattice in a vine, so he argued with her. Price tag aside, the suitcase had also almost cost him his relationship. Never before had he considered his local Target a hostile environment, but he knew he'd have Vietnam-War-style flashbacks if he were ever to return to Aisle 15 — TRAVEL.
"Oh, don't look so mopey." He looked up and, speak of the devil, there she was, brown-eyed, blonde-haired, and grinning at him impishly. "Don't you realize this is the part where we get to go be the heroes?"
It was a dig at him for what he'd said in the hotel back in DC: that the only reason Max wanted anything to do with this was so that she could save the day. Fang hadn't meant it when he said it—it wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last time he said something out of anger—but she wasn't going to let him live it down.
The memory registered just as soon as it was gone as his attention settled on her and only her. The way the sun glinted off her cheeks, splotched red from the midday chill, the hazelnut glow her irises deployed when she poked fun at him. Every so often, he'd have a moment like this, where his eyes drank her in as if he hadn't seen her every single day of his life, didn't know every road and highway that made up the atlas that was Max.
"Pretty sure you're the hero," he said, feeling himself smile. "The rest of us are just collateral."
"Thank God. And here I was, thinking I'd have to share the limelight." She winked at him, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and disappeared into the plane.
This plane was a lot bigger than the last two, and though Fang supposed this should've been comforting, it made him squirm. When they'd gotten home to Arizona, the first thing he'd done (after the blisteringly hot shower) was leap headfirst down the rabbit hole that was aeronautical science. Max had laughed, but he'd seen her peering over his laptop screen out of the corner of his eye more than once, and she couldn't hide her gasp of surprise when his deep dive led him to a Google images search of Amelia Earhart's alleged killer (coconut crabs).
Admittedly, it all seemed to check out (aviation, not coconut crabs; those definitely defied science). But even bigger hunks of metal in the sky just seemed sort of counterintuitive, especially if you considered the fact that the vast majority of this trip was over miles upon miles of isolated open water.
"Sir?"
Fang realized he was still standing at the top of the staircase and had been long enough for it to be strange. He squinted at the guy in front of him, who was gesturing to the suitcase. A flight attendant.
"Would you like me to stow your baggage?"
"No thanks."
Fang watched him nod and walk away, keeping his gaze measured despite the confusion. This was a private plane, right? Why would he stow his stuff? This was a regulation-sized carry-on, wasn't it? Max had insisted it was, right there in The Battle of Target, but he hadn't been so sure—
"If you're sayin' a prayer, better say one on my behalf, too, since I'm not much of a prayin' man," came a deep voice from behind him.
The pilot. He was a hair taller than Fang but probably over a hundred pounds of sheer muscle heavier. Fang didn't know jack about military, but the outfit was elaborate, so he figured the pilot was pretty high-ranking.
Fang planted his feet and refused to blink. "Couldn't possibly be less of a praying man than I am."
The pilot flashed two rows of perfect teeth and stuck his hand out to shake. "Admiral Greene."
Fang shook it, not because he wanted to, but because he knew he was supposed to. "Fang."
"Hate to break it to you, but all this is more tried n' true than y'all are," Admiral Greene said, gesturing to the plane. "Planes've been flyin' since—"
"1917. I'm aware."
Admiral Greene looked impressed and maybe even a little apologetic. "I imagine y'all are the types that aren't too big on the unfamiliar. Can't blame you."
"I don't like what I don't understand."
Admiral Greene laughed good-naturedly, a loud, whooping sound that blanketed the airfield. When Fang frowned ferally enough to bare teeth, the Admiral held his hands up in innocence.
"Don't understand? This? Son, you understand this bullshit more than any number of engineering classes or flight hours or gold stars on this silly getup could've taught me, and I've been doin' this over forty years. For me, this—flyin'—is education. A job. For you? Instinct. Livelihood. Right down t'your bones. Like breathin', ain't it?"
Before Fang could figure out how he felt about this or how to respond, Admiral Greene grinned again and clapped him on the shoulder.
"C'mon, I hear y'all got some bad guys to catch. Zanetti might be just a kid, but he's tougher'n friggin' nails, that one. Fuckin' bastards don't know what's comin' for 'em."
It was stupid fancy on the inside of the plane. Leather reclining seats, tables with magazines, a conference table of sorts topped with laptops to the front by the cockpit door. Fang was the last person to board, but most of the seats were still empty; Leo hadn't been kidding when he'd said his task force was small.
Nudge waved from toward the back of the cabin. She and Gazzy sat across from Iggy and Angel with a table between them. She gestured to the empty seat next to her and Fang slid into it, catching the tail end of their conversation.
"… Siberia just, like, miles of radioactive wasteland?"
"Don't let Putin hear you say that."
"That's Chernobyl, Gazzy."
"Hi, Fang!" said Nudge. "Oh, were you talking to the Admiral? Isn't he so nice? He is such a silver fox."
"What? Yuck, Nudge," said Gazzy.
"Yuck what?" she said, looking offended.
"God, you sure have been Admir-ing him, am I right?" Gazzy waggled his eyebrows. When the bad pun fell on deaf ears, he made a face of disgust. "Why do I hang outwith you people?"
"He showed me the whole instrument panel, explained to me how it works and everything," said Nudge dreamily. At Christmas, she'd forced Ella to take down her cornrows at—I'm going to be running around in the Russian wasteland, can you imagine the frizz?—and now had a pair of what she called "space buns," which she started patting down as she waved animatedly at Admiral Greene. When he disappeared into the cockpit without noticing her, she slithered down in her chair.
Iggy, who already had a white-knuckled grip on a complimentary barf bag, snorted darkly. "Maybe you should try going for someone your own age, Nudge. As in—not from the Stone Age."
"You have no clue how old he is, Iggy, you can't even see him!"
"He smells like Icy Hot and Dior Fahrenheit and is wearing New Balances—"
"How—"
"—I don't know what color—I'm going to assume white—but they're the same shoes he wears when he grills on Sundays. Last weekend was hamburgers and hot dogs. Medium rare. The burgers, not the dogs." He clutched his bag tighter. "He's at least sixty."
"You're making shit up!" Nudge accused, waving her hands.
"Fifty bucks says I'm not."
Nudge unbuckled her seatbelt, shoved herself to her feet, and stomped to the cockpit.
Iggy moaned and shoved his face deeper into his barf bag. "Why do I feel even more nauseous this time? It should be getting better, not worse."
"Because Nudge is hitting on a boomer?" Gazzy said.
"Less adrenaline," Angel said ruefully. She pulled a can of Canada Dry from the messenger bag pooled at her feet and cracked it open before handing it to Iggy. "Here."
"There is absolutely nothing medically sound about this as a treatment, you know," Iggy said, but he took a deep sip from the can anyway.
"Yeah, yeah," said Angel.
The plane started taxiing. Max appeared and finally found her seat across from Fang, electric with nervous energy.
"Guess we're really doing this, huh?" she said, snapping her seatbelt.
Gazzy gave a salute. "On your orders."
She stuck her tongue out at him. "I asked Leo actually how long the flight was gonna be. Turns out they weren't exaggerating. Oh, Iggy," she said, frowning sympathetically at their blind brother, "you're already this sick?"
"Only twenty-six hours to go," Iggy cheered with deep sarcasm.
The pilot came on the intercom and went through his pre-flight routine, and the two flight attendants dutifully demonstrated how to inflate the life vests below the seats. Nudge emerged from the cockpit and slid back into her seat, arms crossed over her chest.
Iggy held his hand out wordlessly. Nudge hmphed, but bent and shoved her hand into her bag, producing a wad of bills that she then handed to Iggy.
Fang had predicted this—Iggy's suped-up senses were impeccable and stupid to bet against, no matter how outrageous his claims could be—but he hadn't predicted that Angel would then hand a hundred dollar bill over to Nudge.
Iggy blinked sightlessly a couple of times. "Why is she paying you?"
Max shut her eyes, a giveaway that she was grasping feebly for patience that she wasn't sure she had. "I leave you guys alone for ten minutes and you turn a government jet into a casino? I'm pretty sure we're breaking some kind of federal law here."
"I bet Angel a hundred dollars that I could convince you I was in love with an old man." Nudge licked her fingers and counted the bills noisily. "Like taking candy from a baby."
"Seriously, Ig?" said Angel. "He's, like, a grandpa!"
There was a comical beat of silence. Then Iggy burst into hysterical laughter, loud enough to turn every head on the plane in their direction. Fang found himself chuckling, too, and before long, the six of them were hysterical.
Something like relief had permeated a fear in Fang that he'd always thought to be impenetrable. Admittedly, he'd sort of expected this process to turn the clock back for them, somehow. Any mention of a mission transported his mind to a place full of cave floors and squirrels on campfire rotisseries and tattered clothes, but this was different. Sure, Nudge had been prohibited from bringing her new cellphone and Iggy and Gazzy's assets were still liquid and Angel was still quieter than he liked, but they were still moving toward normal. They were still happy. Still free.
The Admiral finished his spiel, oblivious to the distracted nature of his passengers, and the engine powered up for takeoff. Iggy stopped laughing abruptly and lost every bit of coloring he'd regained in an instant.
"Fuck," he moaned, face back in his barf bag. "This is the worst part."
Fang agreed. Pretty early on, it became clear to him that he preferred taking off to landing. Plane blows up while ascending? No problem. Fly away from the wreckage. Plane blows up while descending? You'd better hope you're still high up enough to get the frig out of there, man, or you're a human tortilla.
He looked at Max. She had reached her left arm as far as she could behind Iggy to rub Angel's shoulder and crossed her right arm over her body to massage Iggy's knee. It was nothing short of incredible, the way she could do that: put her own fear aside for the benefit of the others. She met Fang's gaze and smiled. It was like the sun coming out in December.
They reached their crushing altitude without the plane bursting into flames, Iggy throwing up, or all hell breaking loose, which Fang took as a good omen. He'd just made it through the immensely difficult process of syncing his Bluetooth headphones to the complementary iPad he'd been provided—Nudge had offered to help but he'd sooner eat glass than give her the satisfaction of being more tech-savvy than him, even though she was by a long shot and everyone knew it—when he sensed someone over his shoulder.
She was taller than Angel but shorter than Max and Nudge, with hair even darker than his own and eyes the color and intensity of a thundercloud. A piece of her silky braid had broken loose and hung in a wisp on her forehead, accentuating the jagged scar that cut through her right eyebrow, all the way down her cheek, and to her neck, where it disappeared under her camouflage UNITED STATES NAVY SEA, AIR, AND LAND sweatshirt. CPT ARNHOLDT was embroidered on the sleeve.
"Max?" she said. Then she seemed to notice the rest of them. "And…"
"And her flock," Iggy said brightly. "The Lord is my shepherd, and all that."
Max snorted. "I'll keep that in mind next time you try to turf off the dishes."
The captain did not smile, instead gliding her hand out for Max to shake. "My name is Captain Takeko Arnholdt, and I am the head of the platoon for this operation."
Max was tough to impress, Fang knew, but a thirty-something SEAL Captain seemed to fit the bill: her eyebrows rose ever so slightly as she gave Arnholdt a quick up-down.
Arnholdt, who was clearly no stranger to this sort of reaction, gestured to her scar. "Didn't get this playing badminton."
Max introduced them all by their flock names, since if they were about to be in the midst of battle with these people, calling Fang "Nick" would be about as effective as a squirt gun at Normandy. Two seats down, Gazzy seemed to be having an awakening of some kind. Fang had to bite back a grin at the look of pure wonder on the kid's face.
"Aye aye, Captain," Gazzy murmured. Nudge hit him very hard.
Thankfully, Arnholdt didn't hear him. She stepped to the side and motioned to the group behind her. "This is Commander Flaherty, Lieutenants Watson and Lowry, and Ensign Antonov. Antonov is normally stationed at the Base in Khatanga, where we'll be headed after landing."
Flaherty was nearly as tall and as pale as Iggy with enough tattoos to fill a museum wall. Watson was the yin to Flaherty's yang: short with skin darker than Nudge's and a waterfall of dreadlocks tied neatly atop her head. Lowry and Antonov were what Fang thought of as the stereotypical Navy SEAL—shaved bald, broad-shouldered, and stoic.
"Small group," Fang said, but his attempt at sounding indifferent fell somewhere closer to harsh.
Arnholdt's face was unreadable. "We were told you're quite accomplished."
"I mean, for a bunch of street rats, maybe," Angel said, nonplussed. "And even then, I don't think I'd say accomplished."
Gazzy looked like he wanted to dive across the aisle and strangle his sister. He reached for his suitcase. "I mean, some of us are accomplished. I, for one, am exceptionally goodat making things blow up—"
"O-kay." Nudge reached down to smack Gazzy's hand from his suitcase before he produced anything incriminating from it.
The tall tattooed one—Flaherty—went rigid. "Civilian, if you have—"
"He doesn't," Fang said curtly, meaning, Conversation over. Infuriatingly, though, when you say something with finality to a high-ranking member of the United States Armed Forces, they don't always tend to listen, especially if it's on the subject of bombs on airplanes.
Flaherty gave Fang a steely glare and rounded on Gazzy again, whose face was quickly turning crimson. "No, no!" Gazzy he back down for his suitcase, unzipping it this time, and the platoon and the flock reacted as if he were about to produce a live grenade. Because maybe he was.
Instead, he pulled out a familiar and well-loved sketchbook, flipping through the pages to reveal elaborate schematics that he'd drawn in pencil. Nudge made a sound of profound annoyance.
"Jesus, Gazzy!"
"Dude," Iggy hissed.
"I just—I wanted…" Gazzy's shoulders wilted and he sighed.
"At ease, soldier," Arnholdt said, and Fang caught her first display of emotion yet: a smothered smile, barely detectable. "Max, we were hoping to debrief with you prior to our arrival, just to smooth out a few logistical points."
Automatically, Max swiveled her head around to look at Fang. Her gaze was very clearly saying, I'll handle this alone, but it was also asking him his opinion, if it this was one of those "this is a democracy, not a Maxocracy" moments that Iggy would normally be prepared to die on the cross over.
Personally, Fang would be content to never attend another debrief of any kind for as long as he lived.
Iggy ended up settling the score for them. "Yawn. If you guys wanna talk shop, do it over there." He pointed vaguely in the direction of the conference table.
Fang nodded in agreement. "If you need me…"
Max smacked a kiss on his cheek. "I won't."
She stood and followed SEALs back to the conference table. As soon as her back was turned, Iggy reached across the table and punched Gazzy in the arm hard enough to make him flinch.
"Good thing the fertilizer's in my bag," he hissed. "Dumbass."
I waited until the debrief with the SEALs was over to bombard Leo with my questions, almost all of which he answered with—let's say it all together, folks!—confidential.
For most things, at least. He knew nothing about the asterisk on Fang's form, but promised he'd have his team back in DC look into it further. The Griffithses were as much news to him as they had been to us way back when, and he shared our suspicions regarding the untimely deaths of Nudge and Angel and Gazzy's parents. As for the missing Appendices that were referenced multiple times on Gazzy and Angel's paperwork—well, it's been a little while since our last disaster, hasn't it?
"Oh, yeah," Leo said easily when I brought it up. He was halfway through the first actual meal I'd seen him eat in twelve hours, a steak bomb sub, but he put it down and brushed his hands off on his slacks. "I meant to ask you about that. Are you sure you didn't take it from Archives yourself?"
He asked it kind of boyishly, like I was a toddler trying to pull the wool over his eyes and he was the good-natured uncle trying to keep the game fun.
"Uh, pretty sure, considering I've never been to Archives," I said back, maybe a little too irritatedly.
"Do you wanna rethink your answer?" He wrapped the remaining half of the sandwich back up and gave me a wry smile. "My secretary was on desk duty covering someone's lunch that day."
"Okay…"
"She's the one who helped you."
"Helped me what?" I growled through gritted teeth. "What day?"
"The day we went to lunch. You went down to Archives while I was looking over the agreement with the lawyers, right?"
"What? No, I most certainly did not!"
Leo's eyes went wide and he held his hands up in innocence. "Whoa, whoa, it's okay. You're not in trouble. If anything, Diana shouldn't have let you down there at all, but you were the talk of the office at that point, so she knew you were legit, at least."
"Leo, I did not leave that conference room." That eerie feeling of oh shit that I'd almost forgotten in the last month or so was creeping back in, but I couldn't quite pin down why yet. "Why did she think it was me?"
"She recognized you," he said, clearly not buying my side of the story. "We'd given her the French fries I got from D'Amico's not ten minutes before, so I doubt she got you confused with someone else."
"Well, she did. Because I didn't go down there, so it makes no sense that anything would be missing from our files."
Leo was decent at masking his emotions, but I had years of dissecting Fang's face under my belt, so I could tell he thought I was fucking crazy.
He pulled out his phone and tapped out a message to someone. "I'll have Diana pull the security tapes and sign-in log for me. Relax, Max. I'm sure it's fine. There's no reason anyone else would even know that stuff exists besides the people on this plane. We'll get to the bottom of it."
That was about as comforting as bullet to the chest.
I looked over to where the rest of the flock was sleeping. I was sort of shocked they'd fallen asleep so quickly until I saw the time—I'd been talking to the SEALs for almost two hours. My own eyelids were heavy, even though I'd slept relatively well the night before.
Leo's laptop dinged in front of him and his face lit up with a sort of cocky smile.
"What?"
Instead of speaking, though, he motioned for me to pull my chair up next to him. Then he clicked on the attached file in his email.
It was remarkably clear for security footage. She was wearing clothes not dissimilar to mine, but her brand new High Tops were a far cry from my Doc Marten knockoffs. We watched as she gave the secretary a winning smile, as she signed my name in her childlike script, and then as she walked down the carefully marked halls of the Archives Department. We watched as she stopped in front of the shelf dedicated to us and pulled out the folder titled Appendices 56a-56g. We watched as she carefully extracted a thin stack of papers and returned the rest of the folder back to its home.
Then we watched as Max II tucked the paperwork into her jacket and waved a wing in thanks at the awed secretary as she left the Archives department.
I cursed loudly and sharply enough to draw a crowd.
Leo was starting to look a little less cocky. "You're going to try to tell me that's not you?"
"Leo, that is not me."
"Max—"
"Look at her hair!" I shouted and jabbed his screen, making pixels dance underneath my fingertip. It was blonde and wind-tossed, just like mine was, but— "Mine was still half-brown at this point. Remember?"
When his expression didn't change, I bit back one of a thousand insults that I kept reserved for the obtusity of the Y-chromosome.
"I don't even own a pair of sneakers."
"Then who—"
"That's Max II, Leo." He blinked. Then he blinked again. When he blinked a third time, the puzzle clicked into place. "You guys didn't know I have a clone?"
Jesus, what else did they not know?
"You think she's a clone?" Leo blurted.
"She is a clone!"
Leo took a deep breath and seemed to try to reset himself. When he spoke this time, it was measured, calm, and very much not a question. "You expect me to believe you have a clone."
From zero to ten on the punchability scale, he was rapidly approaching a twenty.
"What?" I shot to my feet, very aware of the FBI agents that had surrounded our small corner of the plane. "I have wings, Leo! Why would it be too far-fetched for me to have a clone?" Something else occurred to me. "Anne Walker knew about the clone!"
"How many times do I have to tell you, Max—Anne's information means nothing!" Leo was uncharacteristically frustrated. "None of her people have talked. None of them. All of the information she had was destroyed."
Fang was awake and shouldering his way through them, Iggy and the kids not far behind.
"It's her," I said to Fang. His hair was matted on one side where he'd fallen asleep against the side of his chair, but his eyes were piercingly alert. At his confused face, I pointed to Leo's computer, where I'd paused the screen on Max II's profile. "God dammit."
"I want to believe you, I do—"
"Pull up the footage from the conference room," I demanded.
"You said no cameras," Leo said.
"So, what, you didn't record?" I challenged, but, to my surprise, he nodded. "Fine. Where's the one that shows the hall to the conference room, then?"
He found that feed. We watched as I entered the room in my ragged boots and fraying windbreaker, carrying the hot trays of leftovers from D'Amico's, and then he sped up the clip until we watched the six of us walk out of the room two hours later in the video.
The time stamp proved it.
"I don't…" he breathed, but couldn't continue. He looked back at me, still unsure.
I yanked the laptop over to me and clicked back into the video from the Archives, rewinding again. Max II had rolled up the overlong sleeves of her coat, so when she reached to pull the folder off the shelf, we got a perfect view of the inside of her left arm.
I yanked my sleeve up and held my own arm next to the screen, baring the ugly scars that I knew were mine and mine alone. Leo stared hollowly.
"I have a clone," I said again.
There was a brief pause wherein Leo closed his eyes and nodded. When he opened them again, something had changed.
"You have a clone."
A giant exhale of relief gushed out of me. I sat back down in my chair and dumped my head in my hands. The flock stood around me, looking unsure.
Well, they couldn't possibly be less sure than I was.
Think, I told myself. Max II had been working with Jeb and Ari, but I hadn't seen her since Itex a million years ago, and I had admittedly kind of forgotten about her. How stupid could I be? I'd been kicking back and playing house while an actual body double of me had been running around unaccounted for.
Where had she been? Who was she working for? Roland ter Borcht?
Fang, who had inched his way closer to me, started worrying his thumb into where my sweatshirt met the small of my back. It was meant to say I'm here, but the repetitive nature of the act said nothing but I'm anxious. "Why would she take such a huge risk for those documents? It doesn't make sense."
"She must be working for him," Iggy said.
"Even so, why those documents?" I got back to my feet and started pacing. "It's just information about Gazzy and Angel being twins."
I kept pacing, racking my brain for some sort of an answer. Was ter Borcht making more mutants, and he'd ended up with another set of twins? Was he after Gazzy and Angel after all, and this was all an elaborate trap?
It took Nudge's hand on my arm to get me to look up at the five wide-eyed flock faces staring at me.
"What?"
"Max." Her tone reminded me of the way I'd explained things to the kids when they were little—gentle and maybe a little patronizing. Her eyes flicked to Leo's computer screen and then back to me. "What if she's your twin?"
A/N: This is for elevenhurricanes. Welcome back to the fandom! Your review means so much to me. I am honored that this story has helped reignite some of that MR fire in you.