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

10

Ooh, ominous music, right? “They’re coming for you.” Big whoop. They’d been coming for us for four years now. They hadn’t done too well so far.

I strode back to the flock.

“You okay?” Fang asked.

I nodded, then remembered I was mad at him.

I looked away and deliberately sat next to Nudge, against the other canyon wall.

“I just heard from the Voice,” I said.

“What did it say?” Nudge asked, eating a rolled-up piece of bologna.

Angel and Total watched me intently, and Fang stopped typing.

“It said we haven’t been seeing Erasers because they’re all dead,” I said bluntly.

Everyone’s eyes widened to, um, about the size of dinner plates.

“What did it mean, they’re all dead?” Nudge asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. If it’s not pulling my leg, then I would guess it meant...that all the Erasers are taking dirt naps.” I thought about Ari, Jeb’s son, who had been Eraserfied, and felt a tugging pain in my chest. Poor Ari. What a sucky life he’d been born into. And such a short one too.

“Who killed them?” Fang asked, getting to the point, as usual.

“The Voice said...all over the world, every branch of Itex and the Institute and the School—they were all terminating their recombinant-DNA experiments. And that we were almost the only ones left.” It started to sink in, what that meant, and a cold shiver made me put my arms around my knees.

We were all silent for a minute, digesting this.

Then Total said, “Okay, if anyone asks, I can’t talk, right?”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh yeah, that’ll fool ’em.”

“What are we gonna do now?” the Gasman asked. He looked very worried and came to sit closer to me. I reached out and fluffed up his mohawk, which had grown out.

“We have a mission,” I began, ready to psych us all up for solving this puzzle. And possibly taking out a few whitecoats while we were at it.

“We need a home,” said Fang, at almost the exact same time.

“What?” I asked, startled.

“We need to find a permanent home,” Fang said seriously. “We can’t last on the run much longer. I say screw the mission. Let them blow up the world. We can find a place to hide out where no one can find us, and we can just...live.”

11

We all stared at Fang. That was the longest statement any of us had ever heard him utter.

“We can’t forget the mission,” I began, just as Angel said, “Yeah! We need a home!”

“A home!” said the Gasman, looking thrilled.

“A real home, better than our last one,” Nudge agreed happily. “With no grown-ups, and no school or school uniforms.”

“A home with a yard and lots of grass,” said Total. “No more of this pebbles-and-dirt crap.”

Why was I the only one who needed to know what was going on, who needed to understand what had happened to us and why? After everything we’d been through in the last few months, now they were ready to just throw it all away? I mean, Angel’s kidnapping, going to New York, the subway tunnels, the beach, staying with Anne Walker, going to that school...