“Harry!” he crowed in response. He jerked his head forward again, but I was quicker to move this time.
“No, Harry,” I said. Looking at him, I drew an X through the Max stick figure on the ground. I slowly shook my head for emphasis.
“You must never. Do that. Again.”
61
ANGEL’S HEAD THROBBED. The visions were coming more and more frequently now, the flashes almost like electric shocks as they assaulted her consciousness.
She saw Nudge’s face underwater, her eyes wide open in terror. She heard Gazzy’s heart thundering, and then an explosion that drowned out everything else. She felt Iggy’s pain as his body was cracked like a whip.
Angel dug her fingernails into her palms. It didn’t have to be like this. She’d warned them. Why hadn’t they just come with her?
Because of Max. Max was used to running everything, but Angel understood something Max never had about being a leader: She couldn’t do everything all by herself.
So when the flock had bailed, she hadn’t gone to Russia. Not yet. Instead, she’d traveled all over the world, working her small, tired body to the bone, gathering survivors one by one for her cause, meeting people who would listen.
Now she was back in North America, about to cross what had once been the Canadian border. It was all coming together, just like she’d seen, and Angel had one final, awful task left.
It was the vision she couldn’t shake, the one that made her want to smash her head into one of the rusted-out boxcars of the train she was walking past.
Then Angel heard voices.
No, not voices. Thoughts.
She concentrated to hear them more clearly, and what she picked up were two boys who were cold, desperate, and afraid. As Angel focused on them, she learned that their names were Matthew and Lucas—Matthew and Lucas Morrissey. Why did those names sound familiar?
It hit Angel like a splash of cold water. Matthew and Lucas Morrissey: They were exceptional microbiologists who had made breakthroughs in the field when they were still in high school. Angel had glimpsed part of a TV special about them, years ago. But lately she’d heard from several different sources about the interesting things the brothers were up to.
Angel gripped the metal handle and slid open the boxcar door.
Two older teenage boys stood shivering inside. One had a slight build; the other was taller, with broad shoulders. But they definitely looked like brothers—their ebony faces had the same high cheekbones and the same wide, haunted eyes.
“One Light,” the bigger guy said in his best zombie voice.
The imitation was so bad, Angel actually giggled. “I wonder if the Remedy knows the boy geniuses who burned down his lab are pretending to be on his cleanup crew? Is that the best you can do, Lucas?”
Fear came into their eyes.
“Please,” begged Lucas. “We were recruited to make an antidote. We thought the lab was helping people, but they were just making more people sick.”
Angel already knew this. She looked at his brother, who was maybe two years younger. He had one gangly arm hidden behind his back.
We’re dead if she tells anyone, Angel heard him think. If I swing fast enough…
“Before you try to split my skull open with that crowbar, Matthew,” Angel said, her face darkening, “I know why you ran. I know about Olivia.”
Lucas’s eyes flashed with anger and pain as he stepped in front of his little brother. “Don’t you speak her name.”
Poor Olivia, Angel thought sadly. “It’s okay. I know you thought you were saving her, giving her a vaccine.” Instead, the virus had taken her in two days.
“H-how do you know that?” Matthew stammered.
Angel heard Lucas’s mind whirring, imagining ways to escape. She felt sorry for them even as they were thinking of smothering her. These guys had been on the run for a long, long time.
“Yeah, how do you know us?” Lucas asked uneasily. “Who are you?”
Are you a Horseman? was what he was asking.