Max (Maximum Ride 5)

"Math, okay, bring it," said Total, hopping up on a chair. "Are we allowed to use calculators? Do you have some that are, you know, paw-ready?" He held up his right paw.

Ms. Hamilton stopped and stared at Total. I snickered to myself. I had almost forgotten how much fun it could be to bait people. I sat up a little straighter.

Then Ms. Hamilton smiled.

At Total.

"No, we don't have any paw-ready calculators," she said. "But you probably won't need one for these questions, anyway."

Just like that, this grown-up had accepted the talking dog.

Four hours later, Ms. Hamilton told us that our reading levels ranged between first grade and twelfth grade and that we had amazing vocabularies. (Angel was not the one who read on a first grade level, and Fang, Iggy, and I were not, sadly, the ones who read on a twelfth grade level.) We spelled about as well as four-year-olds do but had off-the-chart visual memories. We were majorly lame at math but could solve most problems anyway.

"In short, you're very, very, very bright kids who haven't had much schooling," said Ms. Hamilton.

I could have told her that before we'd wasted all this time. And she didn't even know about the other stuff we could do, like hack computers and jack cars and break into most buildings.

"Angel, you're so far off the chart that we'll have to invent a special chart just for you." Ms. Hamilton laughed.

"I thought you might," Angel said.

I'd been here five hours, and so far I hadn't really wanted to take anyone apart. Weird.

But that didn't mean I wanted to stay at the Day and Night School.

Was I the only one?

18

SOUTH AMERICA," I said coaxingly. "It'll be warm. They have llamas. You like llamas."

Nudge crossed her arms over her chest. "I want to stay here."

We were in her room at a safe house that belonged to the school. It wasn't a bad setup. God knows we've had worse. But it was still part of a bigger confining situation, and my skin was crawling.

"How long do you think it will take another suicide sniper to find us?" I asked.

Nudge shrugged. "This place is out in the desert. And Ms. Hamilton told us about all the safety measures—the alarms, the lights, the radar. This is what we've been looking for."

A year ago I would have ignored what Nudge was saying and just browbeaten her into getting up, throwing her stuff together, and bugging out.

And it would have worked. But we'd been through a lot in the past year. There had been a couple of times when the flock had almost split up. The stuff I had done to make sure we'd survive when the others were little was not the same stuff that would work now. I needed a new way to bend them to my will.

Only problem was, I didn't have any other way. And Nudge had found something she wanted even more—more than me, more than the flock, maybe even more than survival.

She wanted to learn.

"I'm tired of being scared, Max," she said, her large, coffee-colored eyes pleading.

"We all are! And as soon as we finish our big mission, we'll be able to relax. I promise!"

Note: I mentioned the Big Mission, the apocalypse, the end of the world, and so on. Basically, I'm supposed to "save the world." As in, save the entire freaking world. Jeb said everything that had happened to me, to us, was to toughen me up and teach me survival skills. In a way, everything seems like part of that plan, like it's connected. Like we have people trying to kill us partly because they think we're genetic mistakes, dangerous experiments that have gone wrong and so need to be eliminated—and partly because other people think that if I save the world, it'll cut way into their profit margins.

I have to believe that if I keep trying to figure out the bigger picture, it'll all make sense. If it doesn't, I'll be ready for a loony bin. And as hard as all that was for me to accept, it had to be even harder for the younger kids.

"I just want to fit in," Nudge said. She looked down at her tan feet, side by side on the new, clean carpet. "I want to be like other kids."

I breathed in to the count of four. "Nudge, most of the other kids here seem like spineless, gullible weenies who wouldn't survive one day on their own," I said gently.