Max (Maximum Ride 5)

"Come on. I'm going to show you how to make Puchero Yucateco." She gently pulled me away from the window.

Please don't let this be a craft, I prayed silently. If she pulls out yarn, I'll—

As it turns out, Puchero Yucateco is a stew made with three kinds of meat.

Me, my mom, and Ella spent all afternoon in the kitchen, chopping up things, stirring, mixing. My mom showed us how to tell when onions had cooked enough to be sweet, and how to tell when meat was done (usually I just try to wait for it to stop moving). We cut up habanero peppers, and despite all her warnings, I managed to brush my finger against my nose, so my nose burned and ran, and my eyes watered, and I staggered around the kitchen going "Uh, uh, uh!" while Ella collapsed with laughter.

Typical family stuff. With a nonflock family.

"Huh—why is Max in the kitchen?" Gazzy asked as he walked in. His face was flushed, hair permanently tousled from the wind. Clearly he'd been having a glorious, exhilarating time, coasting high above the world. And wasn't that special for him.

"We're cooking," said my mom.

"She's just keeping you company, right?" he asked nervously as my eyes narrowed. Nudge, Fang, Iggy, Angel, and Total all crammed into the kitchen and stared at the wooden spoon in my hand.

"No," my mom replied, trying to keep a straight face. "She's cooking."

Quick, alarmed glances were exchanged among the flock.

"Cooking… food?" Nudge asked. I heard someone murmur something about ordering a pizza.

"Yes, I'm cooking food, and it's great, and you're going to eat it, you twerps!" I snapped.

And that was how I spent my three days of forced rest. The flock saw all the Mayan wonders of the Yucatan, and I learned how to cook something besides cold cereal.

So there was much amazement all around.

But my wing healed, and soon it was time to leave. I was thinking of maybe going to South America.

But the flock had different ideas. While I was healing, they'd taken a vote.

They wanted to try Jeb's Day and Night School.

16

WE STILL HAVE no sightings of the girl Maximum Ride," reported one scout.

The team leader glanced up from the radar images on his desk. "What about the others?"

"We've been tracking them for three days," his subordinate confirmed. "We've triangulated their origination point to within a half mile."

The team leader looked up, but his frown was lost on the combat robot, who hadn't been upgraded to recognize emotion.

"What's the fastest they were clocked at?" he asked.

"The large dark one can achieve speeds of more than two hundred fifty miles per hour," said the scout. "When they are aiming downward, they have been recorded at more than three hundred fifty miles per hour."

The team leader nodded, wondering why the upgrade also apparently hadn't been programmed to use metric. He sighed. The history of these genetic mistakes was a litany of embarrassing failures. Even Itexicon—with its massive, global resources, the years of research, the trillions of dollars spent—had ended up a shattered shell, unable to stop six children. And the Erasers! People were still making jokes about them.

When he'd first heard about the Erasers, he'd thought they were simply an amusing experiment. Despite their speed, relative intelligence, and overwhelming bloodlust, they'd proved quite ineffective. So they'd decided to dispense with

the biological base and went to robots covered with flesh—inexplicably designed to look like Erasers. Then they'd made Flyboys—basically, Erasers with wings. All of which the mutant kids had already defeated.

Since then, it had been basically the same old, same old—one generation of enhanced individual tracking and killing machines after the next. Given all kinds of fancy names, tweaked this way and that. None of them seemed up to the task.

The team leader was truly surprised that Devin had failed. Truly, truly surprised. Devin had never failed at a job for as long as the team leader had known him. He'd lost a hundred dollars on that bet.

However, there did seem to be a sufficient quantity of version 5.0 to perhaps stall or contain the mutated kids until someone better, smarter, more experienced, more focused came along.