Angel (Maximum Ride 7)

“Think of it as an earth cleanse. It will be beautiful. Follow us. Follow us and be free.” She looked directly into the camera, and Fang was mesmerized. The group would save him. Beth would save him. She would help him forget all the harsh—

Star clicked the remote, and the theme song for Project Runway made Fang jump.

His head was buzzing. He felt happy and calm. He felt like everything was going to be beautiful. He shook his head.

Something was seriously wrong.

A group that had sprung up out of nowhere and already had international coverage? Talking about cleansing the earth and taking control? The Doomsday Group set off every antennae of alarm Fang had.

A quick online search for the Doomsday Group revealed surprisingly little, as if it had sprung up suddenly, fully formed. There was no mention of it at all two months earlier, but clearly its members already numbered in the thousands.

Fang sat back. He had his mission.

Someone had to figure out what the Doomsday Group was up to and just how bad it was. It was time for Fang to step up and be a leader, the way Max always had.

A familiar ache filled his heart, and he promptly squelched it. No time for that now. He had too much to do. She wasn’t the only one with a mission to save the world.

Now it was just a question of who would save it first.

21

“I’M NOT SEEING anything,” Dylan said a good twenty minutes later. “I mean, I see the wires. I see where we all hit the ground. The plane’s sheared-off wings are over there, all in pieces. I can even see the plane’s door that ripped off. But what I don’t see is—”

“Hans. Or the plane’s fuselage,” I interrupted.

“You read my mind again!” said Dylan, and I glared at him.

“No, it’s just the obvious huge missing thing. I have a brain. I can think.”

“I know that,” Dylan said mildly. “I was just teasing.”

Now I felt like a clod. I rolled my shoulders to release some tension. “So where do you think it is?” I am highly skilled at changing the subject as demonstrated here.

“It was already smoking and spiraling by the time I got out,” he said. “I didn’t think it would get far at all.”

“We should check under the cloud of balloon-type things,” I said, and Dylan nodded as he started a wide, smooth, arcing turn.

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“Show me how to fly sideways,” he called over his shoulder. “That was cool.”

“The hawks taught us that,” I said. “Basically, you roll and point one wing down. Then keep flapping. You’ll keep moving forward, even though it feels weird.”

Dylan tried it. The first couple of times he looked a little clumsy, but when we reached the wires of death, he was flipping sideways like a pro, powerful and smooth. His learning curve was really amazing.

“Man, each tiny wire has four sides, like a four-sided razor,” he said as we carefully started flying through the wires.

“You can see that?” I asked.

“Yeah. I can see really far, really close, and sometimes right through stuff.” He turned back to grin at me, and I wondered what kind of things he could see right through.

“I guess you’re the improved version of me,” I said coolly. “I have great vision but not like that. I mean, I can see the school building way down there but not the four sides of the wires.”

He smiled at me. “Everyone has strengths and weaknesses,” he said with irritating modesty. So far, I had seen only strengths and no weaknesses from him. But I wasn’t about to say that.

“I’m not seeing squat, other than the school,” I reported. “And we already knew that was there. Let’s broaden our search area.”

“Good idea,” said Dylan, and ten seconds later we were out of those awful wires and in the open blue sky.