18

“ SOUTH AMERICA,” I said coaxingly. “It’ll be warm. They have llamas. You like llamas.”

Nudge crossed her arms over her chest. “I want to stay here.”

We were in her room at a safe house that belonged to the school. It wasn’t a bad setup. God knows we’ve had worse. But it was still part of a bigger confining situation, and my skin was crawling.

“How long do you think it will take another suicide sniper to find us?” I asked.

Nudge shrugged. “This place is out in the desert. And Ms. Hamilton told us about all the safety measures – the alarms, the lights, the radar. This is what we’ve been looking for.”

A year ago I would have ignored what Nudge was saying and just browbeaten her into getting up, throwing her stuff together, and bugging out.

And it would have worked. But we’d been through a lot in the past year. There had been a couple of times when the flock had almost split up. The stuff I had done to make sure we’d survive when the others were little was not the same stuff that would work now. I needed a new way to bend them to my will.

Only problem was, I didn’t have any other way. And Nudge had found something she wanted even more – more than me, more than the flock, maybe even more than survival.

She wanted to learn.

“I’m tired of being scared, Max,” she said, her large, coffee-colored eyes pleading.

“We all are! And as soon as we finish our big mission, we’ll be able to relax. I promise!”

Note: I mentioned the Big Mission, the apocalypse, the end of the world, and so on. Basically, I’m supposed to “save the world.” As in, save the entire freaking world. Jeb said everything that had happened to me, to us, was to toughen me up and teach me survival skills. In a way, everything seems like part of that plan, like it’s connected. Like we have people trying to kill us partly because they think we’re genetic mistakes, dangerous experiments that have gone wrong and so need to be eliminated – and partly because other people think that if I save the world, it’ll cut way into their profit margins.

I have to believe that if I keep trying to figure out the bigger picture, it’ll all make sense. If it doesn’t, I’ll be ready for a loony bin. And as hard as all that was for me to accept, it had to be even harder for the younger kids.

“I just want to fit in,” Nudge said. She looked down at her tan feet, side by side on the new, clean carpet. “I want to be like other kids.”

I breathed in to the count of four. “Nudge, most of the other kids here seem like spineless, gullible weenies who wouldn’t survive one day on their own,” I said gently.

“That’s the point!” Nudge said. “They don’t need to! They’re not on their own – people take care of them.”

“I’ve always taken care of you and the others as best I could,” I said, stung.

Nudge’s eyes softened. “But you’re just a kid yourself.” She brushed her fluffy hair behind one ear. “Max, I want to stay.”

Time to get firm.

“We can’t stay,” I said briskly, standing up. “You know that. We have to go. This has been, well, not fun exactly but better than a punch in the gut. But it’s over now, and we have to get back to reality, however much that might suck.”

“I’m staying.”

Had I heard her right? Nudge was always on my team. She was the agreeable one. Sure, she talked a whole lot and had a weird interest in clothes and fashion, but she was my… Nudge. Almost never in a bad mood. Never fought with the others.

“What?” I said, my mind reeling.

“I want to be normal. I want to be like other kids. I’m tired of being a freak and having to run all the time and never being able to settle down. I want a home. And I know how to get one.”

My chest felt tight, but I forced myself to say, “How?”

Nudge mumbled something, her hair covering her face as she looked down.

“What?” I asked again.

“If I don’t have wings.”

This time I’d heard it, though it was barely a mumbled whisper.

“Nudge, you come with wings,” I said, not even understanding what she meant. “You’re the winged version. There’s no optional Nudge with no wings.”

She mumbled something again, which sounded bizarrely like, “Take them off.” Then she was crying, and I sat back down and held her. Her tears got my shirt wet and her hair kept tickling my nose so I had to keep blowing little puffs of air to keep it away from my face. I was so horrified by what she’d said that it took a couple minutes to come up with something.

“Nudge, getting your wings taken off won’t make you not a bird kid,” I said. I am not at my best in situations like this and mostly just wanted to smack someone and say, “Snap out of it!” So I was really stretching here. “Being in the flock is more than just about having wings. You’re different from other people all the way down to your bones and your blood cells.”

She sobbed harder, and I backtracked quickly.

“What I mean is, you’re special, every bit of you. More special than any other kid in the whole world, including the ones you want to be like. You’re beautiful, and powerful, and unique. Kids without wings don’t have your strength, your smarts, your determination. Remember that guy in the junkyard when we were stealing those bits of cable? Whose idea was it to hit him with a two-by-four, huh? Yours!”

Nudge sniffled.

“Remember when Gazzy was really starting to imitate things, all the time, and he kept sneaking up on us and making a police-siren sound, and we’d always freak? Who was it who taped his mouth shut with duct tape while he slept? You.”

She nodded against my soggy shoulder.

“And what about that time we tried to shoplift underwear from Walmart, and the store manager was chasing us? You ripped a fire extinguisher right off the wall and hurled it at his feet, didn’t you? He went down like a lead balloon, and we got away.”

Nudge was silent. I was congratulating myself for averting disaster when she said quietly, “There’s a difference between being special and being a total freak. I’m a total freak. And I’m staying here.”

19

“THEN SHE SAID that she is a total freak and that she’s staying here. After everything I came up with, everything I could think of, she said she’s staying here.”

My voice seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet night air, and I lowered it. Next to me, Fang leaned back against a huge boulder that was still warm from the day’s sun. After my unsuccessful emo-weep-apalooza in Nudge’s room, Fang and I had flown out into the desert, to a bare place where we could see anything coming from miles away.

Fang frowned and rubbed his forehead. “She’s confused,” he said. “She’s just a kid.”

“You know we have to go,” I said. “What if she really won’t come with us?”

The moon lit the contours of his face. His eyes were the same color as the sky – just as deep, just as dark.

“How can we force her?”

He’d said “we,” which made me feel better. But the hard truth was that we couldn’t force Nudge. “Even if we made her come,” I admitted, “she’d just hold it against us. She’d be mad.”

Fang nodded slowly. “You have to want to be with someone, or it doesn’t work. You have to choose.”

I searched his face, wondering if we were still talking about Nudge. “Uh, yeah,” I said awkwardly. I was just about to say something really important about Nudge, and it flew right out of my mind. “Um, and she…” I tried, but my voice trailed off as I got lost in the intensity of Fang’s expression.

He leaned closer. When had he gotten so much bigger than me? Four years ago he’d been a skinny beanpole! Now he was -

“I choose you,” he said very softly, “Max.”

Then his hard, rough hand tenderly cupped my chin, and suddenly his mouth was on mine, and every synapse in my brain shorted out.