“Do you know where I am?” I spoke out loud, my voice dropping away into dull nothingness.

Yes.

“So tell me!”

Are you sure you want to know?

“Oh no, I enjoy being in a state of complete ignorance!” I snapped. “This is why I don’t want you around anymore! Now tell me, you jerk!”

You’re in an isolation tank. A sensory-deprivation chamber. I don’t know where, exactly.

“Oh, my God. You were right—I didn’t want to know.”

An isolation tank. Nothing but me, my totally screwed-up consciousness, and the Voice. Well, I could probably stand this for say, oh, ten minutes before I went stark-raving nuts.

Knowing the whitecoats, they probably planned to keep me in here a year or two, so they could take notes, see what happened to me.

I needed to die, right now.

125

But I’m Maximum Ride. So it wouldn’t be that easy, would it?

Of course not. My life would never contain a convenient, pain-saving plan when it could stretch a problem out into an endless agony of uncertainty and torture.

I don’t know how long I was in the tank. It could have been ten minutes. It felt like ten years. A lifetime. Maybe I slept. I know I hallucinated. Again and again I “woke up” to find myself back with the flock, back in our house in Colorado or in the subway tunnels of NYC or in the Twilight Inn. I saw Ella Martinez and her mom again, smiling and waving at me.

I think I cried for a while.

Basically every thought I’d ever had in my entire life, I had all over again, one after another in rapid-fire succession. Every memory, every color, every taste, every sensation of any kind replayed itself in my fevered brain, endless loops of thought and memory and dream and hope, over and over, until I couldn’t tell what had been real and what had been wishful thinking and what had been a movie I’d seen or a book I’d read. I didn’t know if I was really Max, or if I really had wings, or if I really had a family of bird kids like me. Nothing was real except being in this tank. And maybe not even that.

I sang for a while, I think. I talked. Finally my voice went. Weirdly, I was never hungry or thirsty. Nothing hurt; nothing felt good.

So when the tank was finally cracked open and light streamed in, it seemed like the worst, most painful thing that had ever happened to me.

126

I screamed, but the sound of my own voice was intensely loud, piercing my eardrums, so I shut up immediately. I squeezed my eyes shut against the blinding light and curled into a ball as much as I could. Big hands grabbed me and pulled me up, and just their touch, after so much nothingness, freaked out my senses.

They put me on a bed and covered me with a blanket. The feeling of anything touching me was torture. I huddled there trying not to move for a long, long time.

Finally I realized that I wasn’t in so much pain anymore. I tried opening one eye a slit. It was too bright, but I didn’t feel like my retina was searing.

“Max?” The hushed whisper woke every nerve all over again, sending unbearably painful chills down my spine. I tensed, my eyes closed. I no longer knew how to run, how to flee, how to fight.

I wanted to be back in the tank, the blessed darkness and silence and nothingness.

“Max, how are you doing?”

Jim Dandy, I thought hysterically. Peachy. Never better.

“Max, do you need anything?”

That was such a ludicrous question that I felt myself smile.

“I need to ask you some questions,” the voice whispered. “I need to know where the flock is heading. I need to know what happened in Virginia.”

That got me. A couple of synapses actually connected in my brain. I pulled the blanket down just a little and opened my eyes a slit. “You know what happened in Virginia,” I said. My voice was thin and rusty, made of nails. “You were there, Jeb.”

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