Max (Maximum Ride 5)

"Max, be careful!"

"What else can I do?" I exclaimed. "I don't exactly want to open our hatch and see if I've developed gills yet! We've got to get Angel out of there!"

Every muscle in my body was as taut as a wire as I moved closer to the throng of M-Geeks. Somewhere in that mess of violent metal was my baby, my Angel. She might think she could rule the world and do anything, but I knew that despite all her powers, she was still a flesh-and-blood, six-(possibly seven)-year-old girl. Who I needed to save. Again.

"Okay, you work the arms," I whispered. "Try to push one aside."

Gazzy's face was white as he nodded, his hands clenched on the controls.

"On my mark," I said. "One, two, thr—"

Suddenly the dumb-bots moved apart, revealing Angel. She seemed to be talking to them earnestly, motioning with her hands, trailing tiny bubbles out of her mouth.

I stared at her, then at Gazzy, whose jaw had dropped in surprise.

Then, as we watched, the dumb-bots seemed to huddle in for a consultation. A minute later, they started to disperse, heading off into the dark water one by one, their little fanlike rotors leaving small white trails behind them. Angel waved good-bye to them, then turned and wiggled her eyebrows at me and Gazzy.

I gave her the universal WTH expression, and she grinned and dog-paddled closer to the Triton. Clinging to the side, she went through an elaborate "told you so" pantomime.

With Angel still holding on, I turned the Triton around and headed back to the Minnesota, feeling overwhelming relief, tension, and extreme irritation all at the same time.

I was giving Angel a look of "Wait till we get back on board, missy," which she was cheerfully ignoring, when her face suddenly went blank. Then her eyes widened in fear, and she pressed herself flat against the Plexiglas dome, her small knuckles white.

"What? What?" I cried. She looked in at me, and my heart turned to ice when I saw how scared she was.

In the next moment, a powerful swell of water came out of nowhere and swept us beneath the bigger sub, making us crash against its underside. Angel clung to the Triton and hunkered down.

"What the—there aren't currents like this, this deep!" I said. Our dome smashed against the metal sub again, and my throat closed as I wondered just how tough the Plexiglas was.

"Holy crap!" Gazzy shouted, pointing.

A mountain was coming up out of the murky depths below us, creating such a huge swell that the Minnesota was actually tipping to one side. We crashed against the sub again, and I jammed the joystick forward, desperately trying to get back to the underwater hatch we had exited from.

"What the heck is that thing?" I cried. If I couldn't keep us angled right, Angel would be smashed between us and the sub. I yanked the joystick to the left.

Off to one side, the mountainous thing moved past us, heading toward the surface. I saw now that it had a beginning and an end and wasn't quite Everest-sized but still totally qualified as ginormously freaking big.

"There!" Gazzy pointed above us, and punched the remote that opened the Minnesota's bottom hatch. The next water swell carried us up into the belly of the sub, Angel still holding on tightly.

"Close the hatch!" I commanded. The hatch doors closed beneath us, and lights flashed as the hydraulic pumps began to force water out of the chamber. Another twenty seconds, and we popped the Triton's hatch, breathing in the damp air. Gazzy and I quickly jumped out, and I grabbed Angel, who was sopping wet and shivering. Holding her tightly, I stroked her hair.

"What happened with the M-Geeks?" I asked.

"I just asked them to go away," she said. "They said okay."

"O-kaaaay," I said. "And what was the swimming mountain?"

Big troubled eyes met mine. "I don't know, Max. It's like nothing I've ever felt before—not like a person or an alien or a mutant. But—it was thinking. It has thoughts. It's intelligent. And it wanted to kill. It wanted to kill everything."

Just then something hit the sub hard, knocking us off balance. More alarms blared, and we heard shouting. There was a gut-wrenching grinding, the sound of screeching metal, then the sub went silent, tilted on its side.

We were dead in the water.

58

BITTER IRONY crushed me: we'd escaped death so many times on land and in the air, only to be doomed to die in the ocean.

I'd read news reports about a hundred Russian sailors who had all died trapped in their sub in less than two hundred feet of water. We were in much worse shape. I didn't know if the sea monster would be back, or if the M-Geeks had really gone away. I didn't know if we were sinking slowly into the darker, colder depths of the ocean, never to rise again. With the power gone, we couldn't even limp back to the base. And at this depth, the water pressure was so great that the hatches couldn't be opened. There was no way out.