Maximum Ride Forever (Maximum Ride 9)

But Dylan had always been one of the most honest people I’d known—he was often a little too truthful about his feelings—and I saw he was serious now.

“I faked their deaths,” he clarified.

“You wha—” I stared at him incredulously. I thought about the misery I’d felt reading those words, the wrenching uncertainty of the past few days. I narrowed my eyes, and my voice was razor sharp. “Why would you do that?”

Dylan sighed and shook his head. “I had to convince the Remedy I’d killed them, so he wouldn’t send the other Horsemen.”

I looked at him sidelong, confused at first. And then I understood, and my eyes flew open.

“The other Horsemen?” I repeated. I stepped closer to him, already balling my fists. “You’re one of the Horsemen?”

“Not exactly…”

Dylan built a fire, and over the next hour, he explained what had happened when he’d left us—how he’d been trying to find the water jugs by the lake and had gotten disoriented.

“I guess it was the toxic gases from the volcano. I just kept stumbling around, retracing my steps. My shoe got stuck between rocks, and when I yanked my foot free, the shoe was completely charred. I knew I had to get out of there, but by then the smoke was so thick I could barely see, and my ears were still fuzzy from the blast. So when I heard someone shout my name, I thought it was one of you.”

The knot in my stomach tightened.

“When I turned,” Dylan went on, “a metal pipe smashed into my face. I fell forward onto my knees, and then someone stabbed my neck with a syringe.”

“Who was it?” I prodded.

Dylan shook his head. “Never got a look. Next thing I know, I’m in an underground lab surrounded by cages.”

Harry’s eyes widened—“cage” was a word he understood.

“What did they do to you?” I asked.

“I found out later they call it upgrading.” Dylan shut his eyes for a second, his jaw tightening. “When it was over, I did feel different—stronger.” Unconsciously he flexed his fingers, and I remembered how he’d felt so much more muscular.

He looked at me. “But the complete reprogramming didn’t take. I was still me, but I was supposed to be somebody else. The only clue I had to go on was a note in my hand.”

He took a piece of folded paper from his pocket and held it out to me. “ ‘One True Way,’ ” I read. “Sounds like some Doomsday nonsense.”

Dylan nodded. “I thought the same thing, but when I walked out of the lab, I saw that the streets all had names like that—Right Path, Just Causeway. One True Way was an address, not a slogan.”

“How did you just walk out of the lab?” I asked.

“I don’t know—one day the door was open. I went through it, expecting to be captured at any second, but I just kept going. Then it was up a bunch of stairs, and I was on a street.”

“Where? What city?” I pressed.

Dylan shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t recognize it. And when I got to the address on True Way, Dr. Gunther-Hagen was waiting for me.”

“Wait, Hans is alive?” I perked up. The last we’d seen of the German geneticist was in the fiery blaze of a plane crash over a year ago. We’d all assumed he was dead.

Dylan glanced at Angel, and she gave a slight nod. He turned back to me and rested his hands on my shoulders. His face was serious.

“Max, Dr. Gunther-Hagen is the Remedy.”

69

“WHAT?!” I WAS on my feet, my mouth hanging open.

“I wasn’t sure what to make of him at first,” Dylan continued. “I tried to keep quiet, feel him out. But after a lecture on how the only solution to the ecological crisis was completely eliminating human impact, he asked me to kill the rest of the flock.”

“You have to be kidding me. Häagen-Dazs? Last I heard, he wanted me to start reproducing! Now we have to