Fang (Maximum Ride 6)

said. “What are we if everyone is like us, or evolved in different ways? What if we become the ones who aren’t special enough?”

“Hm,” Fang murmured. “So where does the doctor go with his plan?”

I frowned. “He asks for help. From scientists, from volunteers. From people who want to be on the cutting edge of a new world. But meanwhile he’s out there injecting people with God knows what — or maybe worse. And not every one of his experiments can be a success. Some of them have to be mistakes. Failures. What happens to those people?”

“He’s not going to want anyone to see his failures,” Fang fact, he’s going to make sure no one does. He’ll have to get rid of them.”

I nodded, feeling sick inside.

“Are you thinking we need to stop him?” Fang asked. “I’m thinking we need to start with some research.”

25

DR. SCARY HAD about 300,000 Google hits. We started wading. The high point was stumbling on a photo of him from grad school, which actually made me laugh out loud. Back in the old days, the doc had a lot of hair. And it was perfectly feathered. Wow. You think you know someone …

But it all went downhill from there.

On around page thirty of our search results, we clicked on a link that looked like gobbledygook — but when the screen cleared and refreshed, it almost made my heart stop. At the top of the page appeared the logotype for the Institute of Higher Living. The rest of the screen was blank except for three boxes for a user name and two passwords.

I hadn’t heard anything about the Institute in a long time. We’d busted into one of their facilities and released some mutants once. That’s where we picked up Total.

Fang and I exchanged glances. We knew we had to find a way to break in.

“Nudge?” I called, and she came over. Nudge had a preternatural gift for computer hacking and was the only one of us who truly knew her way around this high-octane government computer we’d nabbed a while back.

I couldn’t even process the flurry of mouse clicks, screen flashes, dialog boxes going open and shut, and letternumber series that Nudge keyed in to the machine as she tried to hack in. It took her about ten minutes to get access — a long time by her measure — and it took Fang and me twenty more minutes of exploring to find a list of lab reports that sounded like maybe, just maybe, they had the fingerprints of Dr. Hackjob-Wackjob:

Morbid Effects of Autoantibodies on Rodents

Autoimmune Toxicity in Systemic Viral Experimentation on Chimpanzees

Abnormal Cell Differentiation from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Experimentation

Cancerous Effects of Viral Reprogramming of iPSCs in Human Adults

Defective Apoptotic Processes and Cell Proliferation in iPSC Experimentation on Human Children

Most of those words I didn’t know, aside from the red flags of cancerous and abnormal — but human children was all I needed to feel like throwing up. I almost didn’t want to go further. But I drew a breath and forced myself to start reading the first document.

Fang and I stared at the screen.

“Is it just me or does this feel like it’s written in Latin?” Fang said five minutes later. We were both so freaked by the scientific mumbo jumbo that we hadn’t even clicked to the next page view.

“Latin would be easier to understand than this,” I grumbled. “But hold on — see those references in parentheses to ‘figure one’ and ‘figure two’ and ‘figure three’? It means there are pictures somewhere associated with this paper.”

“Well, you know what they say … ,” Fang began.

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” I finished. “Let me just skim through the rest of this stuff real quick and see if anything catches my eye.”

I have to give myself credit for that one. Most grownups wouldn’t have even bothered to try to wade through that crap, but I managed to pick up on two key points.

First: Autoantibodies set your immune system against you and attack the body’s own organs like they’re the bad guys. Second: Abnormal cell growth, too much cell growth, badly “programmed” cell growth = party invitation to cancer. Great.

I started clicking through the pages of the PDF faster now, to get to the pictures. And then, when I did, I wondered why I’d been so eager to see them.

Our grisly tour of Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen’s Gallery of Mistakes took at least two hours.

We saw people with purple eyelids and grotesquely bulging eyes the size of baseballs, people with glands in their necks so swollen it looked as if there were an alien creature growing inside them. Others had muscles so inflamed their bodies ballooned and twisted into shapes I didn’t think possible. The skin disorders were maybe the worst for me to look at. Rashing and cracking and bleeding and virtual disintegration so wildly extreme that I had to stand up and walk away from the computer at one point.