Maximum Ride Forever (Maximum Ride 9)

I glanced at the dense forest around us, at the still-green leaves and undeveloped land. There had to be a ton of wild game nearby.

“We know how to hunt,” I reminded him. “And Harry here is stellar. Harry—”

“Harry!” He’d been hanging off to the side, but now he crowed his name on cue, and Nudge’s face lit up.

Gotta be the dimples. Every time.

“We can definitely use him,” Iggy said. “But a lot of these other mutants are city kids, and they have no idea how to feed themselves.”

“They’re not all mutants, either,” Gazzy said. “Like the girls we brought from the silo—they’re human, but they’re super hard-core.” He beamed. I raised a suggestive eyebrow, and Gazzy snickered, always the lady-killer. “There’s also a lot of lab escapees, like the bug boys over there.”

I followed his gaze to where a bunch of small, athletic kids were kicking around a ball of newspaper tied with rope in place of a soccer ball. They almost didn’t look like mutants at all, except for the hard brown shell that started on their upper arms and went down their backs. There was a paler kid with them who seemed familiar.

“Is that…”

“Holden from Fang’s gang?” Iggy said. “Yeah, that’s the Starfish. They actually have contests over who has the weirder epidermis.” He chuckled. “Kate and Ratchet are here, too, somewhere.”

“Kate?” I jerked my head around to stare at Angel. “The traitor?”

“I found her and Ratchet in San Francisco, in an abandoned mall,” Angel explained. “They were emaciated, living off whatever hadn’t rotted in the food court. Almost everyone else within a thousand miles had died of the H8E virus, but since they were immune, they’d set up a clinic and were transfusing their own blood to save other kids.”

Well, what little martyrs.

“But she still betrayed Fang,” I repeated, emphasizing each word with my open palm. “She and Star sold him out to Jeb.”

It had meant the death of my clone, Maya, and the dissolution of Fang’s gang.

“Trust me, Kate regrets that,” Angel said. “That’s why she’s here—to fix what she did. And we’re going to need her strength against the Remedy’s forces.”

Dylan nodded in agreement, and I remembered what he’d told me about the Horsemen, how they were almost superhuman. Kate might have lightning reflexes and be able to punch with the force of a wrecking ball, but she could never “fix” what she’d done.

“Speaking of Fang’s gang,” Total said curiously, twitching his furry ears. “Where is our dark, brooding brother?”

“Yeah, I thought Fang was coming with you guys,” Iggy said. “Dylan told us—”

“Fang is dead,” Angel answered bluntly.

The words were still like knives, slicing up my heart.

“Yeah, right.” Gazzy started to laugh but then saw the looks on our faces, and his expression morphed into horror. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”

“He was killed by Horsemen,” Dylan said, clenching his fist. “I tried to stop it, but there were just too many of them.”

The words tore through the flock like a hurricane. It hurt to see them realize that nothing would ever be the same.

Nudge’s face crumpled and she buried her face in Dylan’s shoulder as her body shook with sobs. Total flopped on the ground, wailing. Tears ran down Gazzy’s cheeks and he sat abruptly, ripping at blades of grass. Angel rubbed his back, trying to comfort her big brother.

Iggy walked off to the side and blindly stared into the woods, his body incredibly still, his face a mask I couldn’t read. Just like after Ella.

Only I stood alone, my eyes dry. I wouldn’t revisit that grief—not yet. At that point I felt only pure, distilled anger, a seemingly bottomless well of fury.

At Angel, for saying it would happen. At Dylan, for making it true. At myself, for letting him go.

And at Fang, most of all, for leaving. For dying.

How could I ever, ever forgive him for that?

So when Total suggested we say some words for Fang, when Gazzy said we would fight the battle in his name, and when Nudge wanted to hold a candlelit vigil, I bit down hard on my tongue to keep from screaming.