“Not that hungry,” Gasman muttered.

I didn’t get it. The other older boy, the fair one, stood up.

“I’ll do it. Gaz, you pour juice. Nudge, get out the paper plates.”

“But you’re blind,” I said. He couldn’t cook. Or was this some kind of joke?

“You’re kidding! I am?” the guy—Iggy—said sarcastically. He brushed past me and turned on the hot plate. “Who wants scrambled?”

“Me,” said Nudge, raising her hand. She dug out some paper plates and put them on the dinky Formica table.

Huh. Maybe because I was the leader, I didn’t do stuff like cook. Well, I had to look busy, in charge.

“Nudge? Come over here and I’ll fix your hair.” I rummaged in a backpack for a brush. “We could do, like, ponytails or something, get it out of your eyes.”

Nudge—another dumb name—looked at me. “You want to fix my hair?”

“Yeah.” God, what did Max do all day? She didn’t cook, she didn’t fix people’s hair. Did she just sit on her butt barking orders all the time? “Oh, and hey—you—off the bed.” I snapped my fingers at the dog, who just looked at me.

“Why can’t he sit on the bed?” Angel asked.

“Because I said so,” I said, starting to brush Nudge’s hair.

There was silence, and I looked up to see the other four mutant kids looking at me. Well, not the blind one, though his face was turned toward me, which was creepy.

“What?” I asked.

124

The last thing I remembered was being kidnapped from the motel room. No, the very last thing I remembered was seeing that other Max in the room. What happened? Had she replaced me? Why?

At the moment, I didn’t know if I was awake or asleep, alive or dead. I blinked again and again, but there was complete and utter blackness: no shadows, no blurry forms, no pinprick of light. All of us except Iggy can see extremely well in the dark, so not being able to see anything at all made my blood run cold.

Was I blind now, like Iggy? Had they experimented on my eyes?

Where was I? I remembered being bound and gagged. I remembered passing out. Now I was here, but where “here” was I had no clue.

Where was the flock? None of them had woken up when I’d been taken. Had they been drugged? Something worse? Were they okay? I tried to sit up, but it was as if I was suspended somehow—I couldn’t put my feet down, couldn’t push off anything. But I felt wetness. I could touch my face. My hair was wet. I reached out with my hands and felt nothing. There was water or something all around me, but it wasn’t like ordinary water—I couldn’t sink.

I swallowed and blinked again, feeling myself start to panic. Where was my flock? Where was I? What was going on? Was I dead? If I was dead, I was going to be incredibly pissed because there was no way I could deal with this limitless nothingness for an hour, much less eternity. No one had said death would be so intensely boring.

My heart was beating fast, my breaths were quick and shallow, my skin was tingling because blood was rushing to my muscles and main organs: fight or flight. Which reminded me. I stretched out my wings and couldn’t feel a thing. Wildly I reached back with one hand. My heavy wing muscles, the thick ridges where they joined my shoulders, were there. I still had wings. I just couldn’t feel them.

Was I anesthetized? Was I having an operation? I tried as hard as I could to move, thrashing around in the blackness, but again felt nothing.

Very bad news.

Where the heck was I?

Try to calm down. Calm down. Get it together. If you’re dead, you’re dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re not dead, you need to get it together so you can escape, rescue the others, open a can of whup-ass on whoever put you here. . . .

I was completely alone. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been completely alone. If I were in a hammock on a beach, sipping a drink with a little umbrella in it, and I knew the flock was safe and okay and everything was fine, I would be ecstatic. Being alone, off-duty, able to relax—it would be a dream come true.

Instead I was alone with darkness, with fear, with uncertainty. So where was I?

You might not want to know.

The Voice. I wasn’t completely alone after all. The Voice was still with me.

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