It’s funny how different people are. If I’d been this kid and someone was snarling “Ordering a pizza?” at me, without even thinking, I would have snarled back, “Yeah. You want pepperoni?”
But not her. She stared up at me in horror and then immediately burst into great heaving sobs, her hands over her face. Next to her, the boy dropped to his knees and also started crying, without even trying to hide it.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” the girl gasped out, and I lowered her to the ground by her shirt.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I scowled down at her. “Sorry for what? Be specific.”
The girl pointed to the transmitter blinking on the ground. “I didn’t want to!” she sobbed. “They made us! They made us do it!”
I picked up the transmitter and threw it out into the swampy area. It landed with a small splash and sank out of sight. “Who made you?” I demanded, knowing that the clock was now ticking.
For several moments the kids only sobbed. I nudged the girl with the toe of one sneaker. “Out with it!” I said. Yeah, I know: bully Max. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel sorry for these kids. I did. It was just that I valued our lives more than theirs. I know some people would be all, Oh, every life is precious, everyone is equally valuable. And maybe that’s true, in Pixieland. But this was the real world, my flock and I were prey, and these kids had ratted us out. That was the bottom line, and in my life, you’d be surprised how often the bottom line is the only one that matters.
“They did,” the girl said, still crying. By this time the noise had woken the others, and they were making their way through the trees to us.
I knelt down to the girl’s level and took hold of one wrist. “Tell. Me. Who.” I squeezed her wrist slightly, and her eyes widened.
“They did,” she repeated, starting to hiccup. “The guys who—the people who kidnapped us. They’ve had us for months. They took me in August.”
“Me too,” said the boy, raising his face. Tears had made streaks through the dirt on his cheeks, and he looked stripy, like a zebra. “Those guys—sent us to find you. They didn’t feed us for two days, so we’d try hard. And we did. And you gave us food.” He started crying again.
“They said if we didn’t find you, they would never come get us. We’d be lost in the swamp until something killed us.” The girl was shuddering now, calmer, though tears still dripped off her chin. “I’m sorry. I had to.” Her face crumpled again.
I understood. They were trying to survive, just like us. They’d chosen themselves over us, which was exactly what I would have done.
I turned to Fang. “Get our stuff. We’re gone.”
The flock hurried off to dismantle our rough camp. I put my fingers under the girl’s chin and raised it so she’d have to look at me. “I understand,” I said levelly. “The transmitter will bring them here to find you. But we’ll be gone, and you won’t be able to tell them much. Now I’m going to ask you one more time: I need a name, a place, a logo, something. It’s the difference between them picking you up alive and them finding your bodies. Get it?”
Her eyes widened again. After a moment, she barely nodded. She shot a glance at the boy, and he gave her a nod. “Itex,” she whispered, then sank down on the damp ground. “The company was a really big one called Itex. I don’t know anything else.”
I stood quickly. No doubt people were on their way to the transmitter’s coordinates. We had to get the heck out of here. The two kids, filthy and exhausted, lay on the ground like bodies at Pompeii. I reached into my pocket and dropped some protein bars and hard candy on the ground by their heads. They stared up at me, but I was already gone, flashing through the woods. I met up with the flock and then we were airborne, on the run.
Again.
110
An hour later we were almost a hundred miles away. I had no idea what would happen to those kids.
“So, Itex,” I said to Fang.
“I told you it was like a deer,” Angel said.
“That’s ibex,” said Nudge. “And they’re more goatlike than deerlike.”
“Whatever,” said Angel.
“It’s not ringing a bell,” said Fang.
“They have long horns and live mostly in mountains,” Nudge explained.
“No, I mean Itex,” Fang said. “They said it was a big company, but I’ve never heard of it. Which doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yeah, I guess your education has a few gaps in it,” I said. Except for the past two months, none of us had been to regular school, ever. Thank God for television.
“Can we look it up somewhere?” Iggy asked. “Like at a library? Are we close to a town?”
I looked down at the incredibly flat land below us. I saw the tiny buildings of a small town, about fifteen minutes away. “Yeah. Good plan. Twelve points west, everybody.”