I closed my eyes wearily and leaned against the dank stone wall behind me. “How?” I said. “Through Re-Evolution? The By-Half Plan? No, thanks. I’m getting off the madcap train of mass destruction.”
Max, you have to trust me, said the Voice inside my head. You were created to save the world. You still can.
Give it a rest, Voice, I thought. I’m beat.
Max, said the Voice. Max.
Then it occurred to me that the Voice wasn’t actually inside my head.
Oh, God.
I opened my eyes.
Jeb was still kneeling in front of me. “You’ve come a long way, Max,” said the Voice, except that it was Jeb’s mouth moving, the sound coming from him. “You’re almost home. Everything will work out, but you have to do your best. And you have to trust me again.”
It was Jeb, speaking with the Voice, the Voice I’d been hearing inside my head for months.
Jeb was the Voice.
91
Fang paused a moment, his fingers over the keyboard in the Internet café. Next to him, Iggy and the Gasman were sucking down lattes like there was no tomorrow.
Which maybe there wasn’t.
“I feel like I could fly, like, to the space station!” the Gasman said enthusiastically.
Fang looked over at him. “No more caffeine for you, buddy.” He glanced around to make sure no one had heard the Gasman. But they were off in a corner of this run-down coffee shop, and there weren’t that many other people in here anyway.
Iggy drained his cup and wiped the foam mustache off his lip. “I liked it farther south,” he complained. “The sunshine, the beach bunnies. Up north here, this place has too much of the damp-mist thing going on.”
“It’s really pretty, though,” the Gasman said. “The mountains and the ocean. And the people look more real.” He glanced over at Fang. “Are kids still reading your blog?”
Fang nodded. “Tons.”
He scrolled down quickly, scanning the entries, and then he felt someone’s eyes on him. Instantly he looked up and tracked his gaze left to right, taking in the whole café. It was times like this he missed Max the most—because she would have felt it too, and they would have exchanged glances and known what to do in a moment, without speaking.
Now it was just him on this coast, and her and that cretin wherever they were.
Fang saw nothing, so he moved his eyes more slowly this time, right to left. There. That guy. He was headed this way.
Fang shut the laptop and tapped Iggy’s hand. The Gasman saw it and looked up, on alert. Eight years old and his fists were clenched, muscles tight, ready to fight.
When the guy was about fifteen feet away, still beelining for them, Fang frowned.
“We know this guy,” he murmured. “Who is he?”
Casually the Gasman turned and looked over his shoulder. “Uh...”
“His footsteps,” Iggy muttered. Fang couldn’t hear his footsteps. Iggy went on, face pinched with concentration. “Those footsteps...We heard them...in a subway tunnel.”
Fang’s eyes widened, and he sharpened his focus.
Of course.
Now the guy was six feet away, and he stopped. Fang had never seen him in daylight before, only in flickering reflections from oil-can fires in the train tunnels below New York City. He was the homeless computer nerd who carried a Mac everywhere he went, the guy who’d claimed that Max’s chip was screwing up his hard drive. When they’d asked him about her chip, he’d gone wiggy and run off. What was this guy doing here?
“You.” The guy frowned and pointed at them but pitched his voice so only they could hear him. “What are you doing here?”