Angel (Maximum Ride 7)

ut dust.

Where was Angel? Where was Fang? I shot a panicked look at Dylan, and he understood immediately, diving down the hole to find them.

Could Angel and Fang really be gone? My brain whirled at the horrible possibility. Gazzy was still wheezing, unable to talk. There were times when I’d thought I’d lost Angel or Fang before. And when Fang left, I never thought I’d ever see him again. But that had felt more like… I wouldn’t see him, but he still existed. What about now? How would it feel if he—

I was swallowing shakily, terrified thoughts piercing my brain like shards of glass. Just as Dylan landed on the street, Fang shot up toward me, coming through the billowing clouds of dust and debris. His shirt was shredded, his face bruised and cut. Like Gazzy, he was covered with soot.

“Gaz! You made it out,” he gasped, when he got closer.

“Angel was right behind me,” Gazzy said. “Right behind me!” He looked around us, everywhere, as if expecting to see his sister making her way toward us.

I flew right up to Fang and clutched him, if only to convince myself that he was really alive.

That intense joy and relief ended in a nanosecond. I pulled back and grabbed his shoulders. “Where’s Angel?!”

“I—don’t—”

“How could you leave her?” I shrieked.

“Max, I—Gaz was almost done and I thought—Angel said—”

I looked into Fang’s face. His dark eyes, usually bottomless, were full of emotion. His face was ashen. My eyes widened and my hands dropped from his shoulders. I let my wings take me backward, away from him, as a silent, searing scream started to rise in my chest. He didn’t say anything out loud, but he told me just the same: he didn’t know where Angel was, and he was afraid that something awful had happened to her.

My breath caught in my throat, and my blood turned to ice. Had she been trapped by the second explosion? It didn’t seem possible. I remembered her small, earnest face, saying, “I can deal with pretty dangerous.”

“Angel, where are you?” Gazzy yelled, turning in circles, bobbing up and down in the sky, then suddenly he crumbled, his face dissolving into tears. My munitions and weapons expert really was just a nine-year-old kid, and he’d just lost his little sister.

And I’d lost my baby.

78

“IT’S BEEN FIVE HOURS, Max.” Dylan’s quiet voice was like sandpaper.

“I refuse to believe that she didn’t escape,” I said stubbornly, and tried to help superstrong Kate shift some more twisted wreckage from the blast site.

Dylan and I had even crawled through the rubble near the manhole and tried to get back into the sewer system. But the tunnel had completely collapsed, and Gazzy said that while he’d managed to defuse most of the network of bombs, he obviously hadn’t gotten to every one, plus the poison gas was still down there.

He’d given me that information through sobs, as I held him, his head on my shoulder.

Angel’s last words to me kept replaying in my mind: It’ll be okay, Max. I’ll be with you always, no matter what. And Max—I believe in you. Forever. What had she meant by that? Had she had some premonition that she might not come back? Had she made the ultimate sacrifice? She’d talked of all my sacrifices. I was haunted by the idea that she might have chosen to make one of her own.

Next to me, Kate sat down. Star held out a bottle of tepid water, and Kate drank it. She looked exhausted. I sighed and bent down to move another chunk of cobblestone.

The police had closed down the entire area, evacuating the buildings that were still standing, clearing the Place de la Concorde. We’d hovered above the Louvre, waiting for them to leave, after Fang had made sure that his gang was okay. They’d been great, helping to rescue at least twenty people trapped under the rubble, helping to get hurt children to nearby hospitals. Now they sat on a curb, looking wiped, like Nudge, Gazzy, and Iggy. Only Fang, Dylan, and I were still on our feet. Just barely.

An aerial search had turned up nothing, but after two hours we’d found one of Angel’s pink sneakers, two blocks away. It had been ripped apart, its sole dangling. A section of it was stained with blood.

That’s when I had finally broken down.

“I tried to get to all of them,” Gazzy sobbed. “I thought I had. There must have been like a remote setoff that I didn’t know about. I don’t know what happened.” I remembered the wires sticking out of Mark and shuddered.

Would Gazzy ever forgive himself? I was the one who had decided to let him try. If I had insisted he leave there, made all of the flock get out of there and let the DGers…

We’d all be safe, but thousands of people might be dead, Paris would be even more ruined than it was now, and I’d still never be able to forgive myself.

This was the hard stuff, the leader stuff, the save-the-world stuff that I just couldn’t stand having to deal with. At a certain level, there are no best choices, no right decisions. Only choices that are less bad, decisions that are less wrong.

It was dark now. It was hard to accept that we’d found all we were going to find. We’d all been crying, off and on, for hours, except for Fang and Dylan. Somehow they had remained strong as they worked side by side with me, shifting the biggest boulders and the heaviest pipes.