Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports (Maximum Ride 3)

Fang opened his laptop to a Dallas tourist site.

“There’s a big art museum,” he said, with no convincing enthusiasm. “And an aquarium.”

Angel sat patiently on the ground, smoothing her teddy bear Celeste’s increasingly bedraggled fur. “Let’s go to the cowgirl museum,” she said.

I bit my lip. Why couldn’t we just get out of here, go hide someplace, take the time to figure everything out? Why was I the only one who seemed to feel a pressing need to know what the heck was going on?

“Football game,” said Fang.

“What?” Iggy asked, his face brightening.

“Football game tonight, Texas Stadium.” Fang snapped the laptop shut and stood. “I think we should go.”

I stared at him. “Are you nuts? We can’t go to a football game!” I said with my usual delicacy and tact. “Being surrounded, crowded, by tens of thousands of people, trapped inside, cameras everywhere—God, it’s a freaking nightmare just thinking about it!”

“Texas Stadium is open to the sky,” Fang said firmly. “The Cowboys are playing the Chicago Bears.”

“And we’ll be there!” Iggy cheered, punching the air.

“Fang, can I talk to you privately for a second?” I asked tersely, motioning him out of the memorial.

We stepped through an opening in the cement wall and moved a couple yards away. I put my hands on my hips. “Since when are you calling the shots?” I demanded. “We can’t go to a football game! There’s going to be cameras everywhere. What are you thinking?”

Fang looked at me seriously, his eyes unreadable. “One, it’s going to be an awesome game. Two, we’re seizing life by the tail. Three, yeah, there’s going to be cameras everywhere. We’ll be spotted. The School and the Institute and Jeb and the rest of the whitecoats probably have feeds tapping every public camera. So they’ll know where we are.”

I was furious and didn’t know what to think. “Funny, you didn’t look insane when you got up this morning.”

“They’ll know where we are and they’ll come after us,” Fang said grimly. “Then we’ll know where the tornado is.”

Comprehension finally dawned. “You want to draw them out.”

“I can’t take not knowing,” he said quietly.

I weighed Fang’s sanity against my determination to remain the leader. Finally I sighed and nodded. “Okay, I get it. One major firefight, coming right up. But you so owe me. I mean, my God, football!”

6

This may surprise you, but people in Texas are very into their contact sports. I saw more than one infant wearing a Cowboys onesie.

I was wound tighter than a choke chain on a rottweiler, hating everything about being here. The Texas Stadium was, shock, Texas size, and we were surrounded by more than sixty thousand popcorn-munching opportunities to go postal.

Nudge was eating blue cotton candy, her eyes like Frisbees, looking at everything. “I want big hair!” she said excitedly, tugging on my shirt.

“I blame you,” I told Fang, and he almost smiled.

We sat down low, by the middle of the field, about as far from any exit as we could be. I would have been much happier, or at least slightly less miserable, in the nosebleed section, close to the open sky. Down here, despite the lack of roof on the stadium, I felt hemmed in and trapped.

“Tell me again what we’re doing here,” I said, running a continuous scan of our surroundings.

Fang popped some Cracker Jack into his mouth. “We’re here to watch manly men do manly things.”

I followed Fang’s line of sight: He was watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who were not doing manly things, by any stretch of the imagination.

“What’s going on?” Iggy asked. Unlike the others, he was as tense as I was. In a strange place, surrounded by loud, echoing noise, unable to get his bearings—I wondered how long it would take him to crack.

“If anything happens,” I told him, “stand on your chair and do an up-and-away, ten yards out and straight up. Got it?”

“Yeah,” he said, turning his head nervously, wiping his hands on his grubby jeans.