The Final Warning (Maximum Ride 4)

“Obviously, this is an extreme environment,” Brigid said. “We do have dangers here, as you have seen. For example, what would you do if you suddenly realized you were lost? A lot of the terrain looks the same.”

“I’d fly up till I could see the station,” I said. “Then head back to it.”

The scientists looked at me, taken aback. I guess that solution hadn’t occurred to them.

“Okay,” said Brigid, nodding slowly. “That would work. Now, there aren’t that many crevasses, but they can be extremely dangerous. If you happen to fall into one —”

“I would fly back out of it?” I suggested.

“Um, yeah,” said Brigid, then heroically pressed on. “Okay, you know the penguins aren’t dangerous, nor are any of the other birds here, though you should stay away from nests. And of course there are no polar bears.”

We nodded. Nudge, Angel, and I had been crushed about the lack of polar bearity.

“But as you saw, leopard seals can on occasion attack,” Brigid went on. “We recommend staying at least twenty meters away from them at all times. But if you do find yourself confronting one again, I’d recom —”

“Flying away from it?” Really, this was too easy. I was bad.

By this time the flock were suppressing smiles.

“Blizzards,” said Brigid firmly. “Katabatic winds. Sometimes upward of eighty miles an hour. They blow snow and ice particles around, and it can feel like needles.” She paused, as if waiting for me to say I’d fly out of it.

Which I didn’t. You’d ha

ve to be a complete moron to fly in a storm like that. Last time I looked, I wasn’t a moron.

“Hunker down,” said Brigid, relieved to finally be able to give us advice. “Dig a hole for yourself in a snowbank. Stay together. Don’t eat ice for hydration — it’ll only lower your core temperature. Stay put and wait for help. We will come find you.”

“Aye aye,” I said, and saluted.

Brigid gave me a faint smile, and then we all suited up to brave the great outdoors. Brian Carey watched us gather our equipment. He was staying behind to type up some reports.

Ordinarily, Sue-Ann would have taken the ice samples we brought her and put them through her chromatograph. Now it was Melanie’s job. She would analyze how concentrations of carbon dioxide and other chemicals had changed through the centuries. Basically, they were finding that carbon dioxide levels — primarily a by-product of burning fossil fuels — were the highest they’d been in the past 800,000 years.

Being completely objective here, I could see how that would seem like a bad thing.

48

“KNOWING THAT THERE ARE EVIL, bloodsucking corporations out there willing to spend a bazillion dollars to create machines whose only purpose is to kill us mutant bird kids is depressing,” said Nudge. We were kneeling on the ice, helping Melanie and Brigid drill their core sampler down into it. “Knowing there are evil, bloodsucking corporations out there who are knowingly and willingly destroying the only planet we have to live on just to make bazillions of dollars is worse.” Nudge sighed and looked bummed.

Okay, I totally admitted that there were evil corporations out there who were complete bad guys and were polluting everything in sight. I got that. But I still wasn’t sure that it was all causing global warming, or that having a slightly warmer earth would be that bad.

“How can they possibly stand themselves, knowing what they’re doing?” I agreed. “I mean, how many cute shoes can one company need?” You’d think I was megalomaniacal enough to understand their mind-set, but I didn’t. It was like, make a bunch of money so you can control things, like land or armies or governments or countries — and you want to control them so you can . . . essentially make more money. So you can control more things. So you can make more money. Kind of an empty loop, huh?

Not to be judgmental.

But someone had to be judgmental! Someone had to judge that this was crazy and wrong, and those companies were boneheaded idiots! If that person had to be me, so be it. I might not be the perfect spokesmodel against global warming, but I could still absolutely be against pollution. That had been proven to be bad, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I want a baby penguin,” said Angel, tugging on my jacket to get my attention.

She snapped me out of my alarm-clock-of-doom reverie, and I looked down at her.

“No,” I said, before I really processed what she had said.

Her face got that set look I’d learned to dread.

“No,” I said more firmly. “You already have Celeste and Total. We cannot also have a baby penguin to cart around. Especially when that baby will grow up to be the size of an average third-grader.”

Angel took a deep breath. “They’re so fuzzy and cute,” she began. “They make little cheeps. There’s a bunch here — it wouldn’t even cost anything. We could —”