Maximum Ride Forever (Maximum Ride 9)

“Overgrown guppies,” Total growled through his teeth. They’d wrapped seaweed around his snout to make a makeshift muzzle, but if there’s anyone you can’t shut up, it’s Total.

Then Rizal himself stood in front of us and pulled a large hunting knife from his belt. He tested the blade with his thumb, and I scowled.

“It’s a little cowardly to kill somebody when they’re tied up, don’t you think?”

Silently, Rizal released the door of the cage and then cut through the rope that bound our wrists. I rubbed my raw skin, not taking my eyes from the knife. If Rizal made a move, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

“Our weapons are for hunting,” he said evenly, and dumped a basket of fish at our feet. “And no one gives us orders. We rule ourselves.”

I hadn’t understood how starved I’d been until then, and Nudge, Total, and I all lunged for the basket. When I held a silvery body in shaking hands, I told myself it was just like sushi. Like a sushi kit. The sushi was just still inside, that’s all. As the mutant kids looked on with expressionless faces, I hungrily tore into the fish’s side, ignoring scales and fine bones and just chomping away. I ate it like an ear of corn, turning it around, nibbling off every bit of flesh, and then throwing the head and tail into a pile. Then I grabbed another one.

By the end of our messy feast, we all had shining scales flecking our hair and skin, bloody mouths, and unnamable gore lodged so deeply under our nails that it would probably never come out. I felt a thousand percent better.

After Total let out a delicate burp, Rizal finally spoke. “We’ve decided you can stay in our community,” he said. He walked back and forth in front of us with his spear slung over his shoulder. “Once we are there, you will not swim in the open water. You will not be permitted to hunt. You will not leave the caves.”

I looked up from my pile of fish bones. So the caves are intact.

“I am an excellent paddler!” Total protested. “And the girls both have gills.…”

Rizal dismissed the suggestion. “If you don’t follow the rules, you’ll be killed.”

“Wow, love the hospitality.” I wiped the blood from my lips and accepted that my hair would smell like fish guts for the rest of my life. “You rule yourselves, but you kill any dissenters. Is that what happened to everyone else?”

“We didn’t murder the other mutants. When the sea first flooded the caves, there was no way out. The bird kids, the bug kids—everyone drowned all around us.”

“What about the humans?” I asked, trying to temper my hope. Maybe Angel couldn’t sense anyone’s thoughts on this part of the island after the first few days, including the fish kids and my mom. There was a chance.…

Rizal snorted. “Pierpont barricaded himself in the food vault because it was watertight. It was almost a month before the sea receded enough for us to pry open the door.”

“He left everyone else to starve?” Nudge gasped.

Rizal nodded in disgust. “We found him curled on the floor. Ironically, he escaped drowning but died of thirst. Every can of soup and fruit had been sucked dry.”

“And the others?” Total asked quietly. “Do you know their fates?”

“The girl, you mean? And the veterinarian?”

My half sister, Ella. My mom.

Rizal flicked the dark hair out of his eyes absently, as if nothing at all was riding on his next words. “Same as all the rest,” he said, shrugging. “The water came in. We swam. They drowned.”

“Oh,” I said in a flat voice, and gripped the rock floor for support as I felt my blood draining.

Deep down, I’d known that was the likeliest scenario, but I understood now why Iggy hadn’t wanted to stay on the island: Not really knowing was so much better than knowing.

Because you could never get that hope back.

28

“DON’T BE AFRAID of Rizal,” the kid called Jonny Diamond said. “He can be harsh, but he’s just trying to keep us safe.”

Everyone was getting ready to go to the caves, but I’d remained rooted to the rock long after the feast, thinking about my family. I thought about how Ella’s face lit up when she looked at Iggy, and how she never even got to go to a school dance with him. About how, even though my mom was supersmart and at the top of her field, she was always trying to do mom things for me, like cooking great meals and getting me my own bed with fancy sheets and snuggling me, even when I resisted, because she knew I secretly craved that contact. I remembered how they’d both opened their home to me the very first day we’d met—never mind that I was a stranger, a mutant, and being shot at by stupid teenage boys.

Yet, though I managed to look out for the rest of my flock, I hadn’t kept my human family safe when it mattered. And now, though I could still hear Ella’s laugh and remember what my mom smelled like (antiseptic, vanilla shampoo, and cinnamon gum), I couldn’t quite picture their faces.

Anyway, I’d been meditating on that cheery subject for hours, so I must’ve looked pretty desolate by the time Jonny came in.

But scared? Of Rizal? Doubtful.