School's Out- Forever (Maximum Ride 2)

Dinner. Anne really tried. But this was a woman whose main source of nutritional comfort came in single-serve microwavable packages. After the first day, she’d gone shopping and brought home fifteen bags of groceries and a cookbook. With mixed results.

But you know what? The food was hot and someone was fixing it for us, which made it fabulous in my book.

After that first day, I tried to start getting the flock ready for bed before Anne could do it. It bothered me, her doing it. Taking over my role. I was still the leader. Soon Anne and her comfy house would be just a memory. Just like Jeb. Just like Dr. Martinez and Ella. Just like everything in our temporary lives.

One night after we’d been there almost two weeks, I was lying in bed listening to my favorite, favorite singer, Liam Rooney. Liam, Liam, you are my inspiration. The younger kids were already asleep. There was an almost silent tap on my door.

“Yeah?”

Fang came in.

“What’s up?”

“Look.” He put some of the coded sheets from the Institute on my lap, then hauled a big spiral-bound book onto the bed. He opened it up across my knees.

“I was looking at this stuff, going nuts, you know? And suddenly it looked like map coordinates.”

I drew in a breath. As soon as he said that, I could see the possibility.

“This is a book of detailed street maps of Washington DC,” he said. “I got it out of Anne’s car. Look—each page is numbered, each map is numbered, each grid of each map is numbered. And look at this clump of stuff here, by Gazzy’s name. Twenty-seven, eight, G nine.

“So I go to page twenty-seven, and it’s a section of town, see?”

“Yeah,” I breathed.

“This section has twelve smaller maps. I go to map eight.” He turned pages. “Which is a blowup of one section. Then I go to column G and trace it down to row nine.” His finger slowly moved down the map. “And it’s a pretty specific little chunk of streets.”

I looked at him. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Did you try any others?”

He nodded. “This one by Nudge’s name. Same thing—I actually end up with a real place.”

“You are so brilliant,” I said, and he shrugged, looking almost embarrassed, except that Fang never gets embarrassed. “But I thought Nudge was pretty sure she’d found her parents in Arizona,” I added.

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. The woman we saw was black, but it wasn’t like Nudge was a photocopy of her. You think this is worth checking out?”

“Absolutely,” I said, swinging my legs out of bed. “Everyone else asleep?”

“Yeah. Including the Annemeister.”

“Okay. Gimme a minute to get some jeans on.”

26

“Hmm,” I said.

Fang propped the map book on a fire hydrant and braced it with one knee. He took out the page of code, and I held the penlight so he could see. He double-checked the coordinates, showing them to me. I looked at the street signs at each end of the block.

“No, you’re right,” I said. “This is it. If those are map coordinates, then this is where we should be.”

We looked at the building across from us. It was not a cute house with a picket fence, suitable for bringing a baby home to, a baby that would later be turned into a mutant bird kid by mad scientists. No, it was a pizza parlor.

On this block were a car wash, a bank, the pizza joint, and a dry cleaner. On the opposite side of the street was a park. No houses, no apartment buildings, no place where someone could have lived.

“Well, crap,” said Fang.

“I concur with that assessment,” I said, crossing the street. “Maybe there was an apartment building here and it got torn down.”

We stood in front of the darkened store and peered inside. Hanging on the wall was a black-and-white photo of a bunch of people standing in front of a new, shiny version of the store. “Here since 1954,” the caption under the picture said.