Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure (12 page)

An operating table.

Again.

She was too exhausted to struggle. What was the point? They would find a way to make her cooperate. She had no more tears left, so she lay dry-eyed as her arms and legs were clamped to the sides of the table.

“This is for your own good,” someone told her—a whitecoat whose voice she didn’t recognize. “We need to make sure there’s no way you can escape these tests.”

Angel’s heart clenched. More tests. What could they possibly do now? Hadn’t they already taken samples of skin, bone, blood, and feathers? How could they not know every square inch of her, down to the cellular level?

Another pair of cold metal forceps moved along her shoulder blades. They reached under her back, then forcibly unfurled her wings, pulling them out from beneath her. Her wings, too, were clamped to the operating table.

She tried to fight the nausea, but felt bile rising in her throat.

They’d never done this before. Never.

A whole new level of fear streaked through Angel’s body. She realized what was coming right before it actually happened.

Small snipping noises filtered into her brain, followed by a pinching sensation at her primary feathers.

“Done,” the whitecoat said. “Good little mutant.” He left the lab, his footsteps fading away as the door closed, leaving Angel clamped to the operating table. She remained silent the entire time, mute with shock and horror.

They’d clipped her wings.

41

EVERYTHING IS ABOUT to change
, the Voice said.
Prepare yourselves.

Every single member of the flock heard it.

Your task is to record what happens.

Nudge yelped and dropped the bottle of glue, leaving a glittery blue stain on her scrapbook.

“What—” she began, but was interrupted by the Voice.

Write, blog, take videos on a cell phone—it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you record everything, down to the last detail. Everything. You have to record it all—for the future.

A Voice in her head. Another huge clue that she was a freak. Nudge wanted to cry, wanted to scream at the Voice
to leave her alone, to let her at least pretend to be kind of normal! Nudge clenched her jaw and determinedly went back to making her scrapbook of normal, wingless girls.

Nudge, this is about the future. In the future, you
will
be normal. In the future, you might even get sick of feeling average. But right now, the world needs you.
The Voice sounded unusually gentle.
This task is the most important thing you will ever do for humankind. So get up, grab your phone, and start keeping a log—for the future.

Nudge hesitated. This felt really urgent. She didn’t want any part of this. But she knew one thing: Max never went against the Voice. Nudge sighed, her shoulders slumping. There would be no normalcy today. “Okay,” Nudge said, defeated. “Okay.”

Don’t let Max out of your sight.

Iggy and the Gasman, in separate rooms, both sat up, listening. The Voice. They’d heard it only once or twice before. They were hearing it now. Like before, it seemed important, vital, that they do what it said.

You must protect Max at any cost—even your own lives
, the Voice said.
She must survive to lead. The calm is over. The storm is on the way, and the skies will break open with its force. Do you understand?

Not really
, Gazzy thought, peering outside at the blameless blue sky. No menacing dark clouds, no swarms of locusts, no angry mobs. But he knew the Voice was right
about one thing—he needed Max as a leader, and if her life was in danger, he was absolutely willing to protect her from weather or whitecoats or whatever else came along.

Gazzy stood up, ready to go find her, then hesitated.
Don’t let Max out of your sight.
Did the Voice really mean never
ever
let her out of his sight, no matter what? Surely Max would need bathroom breaks? What had the Voice said? Protect her with his own life! Well, of course, and that sounded like they would definitely need explosives before too long. But…

In the kitchen, Iggy was holding a mixer blade as cake batter dripped, unnoticed, onto his shirt. He had to protect Max? Even at the cost of his own life? He cocked his head, listening intently. He could hear nothing out of the ordinary—no vehicles or choppers on their way, no one shouting alarms. Total wasn’t even barking, not that he usually did. But for some reason the Voice needed his help. Right in the middle of this cake.

“Okay. She’ll survive without my help—she’s too stubborn to die,” Iggy muttered. “But I’ll protect her anyway.”

Good.

Harden your heart.

Why, hello there, Voice
, I thought snidely.
It’s nice to see you, too. How’s tricks?

There’s no time for jokes, Maximum. Time has run out. The end is here, Max. Now.

I stopped slashing wing holes in the back of a hoodie
and frowned.
The end? Like the apocalypse? No offense, but if I had a nickel for every time I’d heard that
—

This is no time to be getting soft, to let your guard down, Max. You’re not as paranoid as you used to be. You’re not as strong.

Hey, I am
just
as paranoid as I ever was
, I thought defensively.
Our life here just happens to be on the calm and peaceful side of the spectrum. For once.

Listen very closely, Max. Your task, at the end, is to harden your heart.

Harden my heart? Like,
further
? Isn’t that what everyone has always complained about with me? Now it’s a
good
thing?

Lives will be lost. More than you can imagine. In order to survive, you must harden yourself against their suffering. Lose the softness. Become the fearless leader again.

I scowled at the implication that I’d ever been less than a “fearless leader,” but I had to admit, I was rattled—as much by the Voice, whose word I’d always taken as gospel, saying that the end was finally here as by the Voice, who had told me I had to save the world in the first place, telling me to put myself first. My mind recoiled at the confusion, and at the Voice’s hardness.

Its certainty.

I waited for the Voice to say something else, but it was silent—apparently my brain was only mine again. As messed up as that sounds.

Dread gnawing at my insides, I pondered my task: to harden my heart. Come what may.

42

EVERYTHING IS ABOUT to change.
Dylan paused the video game he was playing. He looked around, but no one was near him.
Prepare yourselves.
Was this his… Voice? He knew Max, and possibly the other members of the flock, had heard it before, but this was totally new to him.

Um… what do you want?
he thought. For a second, he was almost excited. It was like he was one of them—even more like Max—now that he had a Voice, too.

But his excitement quickly went cold.

You have a task ahead of you, Dylan. One that only you can perform. One that you must perform. Do you understand?

This sounded familiar. Dylan fought a wave of nausea as he remembered Dr. Williams describing the other task he had to perform—bringing Fang in for a life of torture.
Now this weird Voice in his head was demanding something else of him that he supposedly couldn’t refuse….

What is it?
Dylan thought with dread.

The answer wasn’t anything he would have predicted.

You must fully win Max’s heart. The survival of the world depends on it.

Dylan groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Like I haven’t been trying!” he said aloud, exasperated
. Is that all? Sure you don’t have any dragons I can slay instead?

A nice, solid, physical goal. That was what he needed. He was pretty confident about his physical abilities—flying skills, fighting technique, speed, strength.

But Max’s heart… Max was an enigma wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in a cipher. Or something. He’d been trying to win her over ever since he’d joined the flock. Every once in a while, it felt like he was making headway. Dylan’s face flushed as he remembered the few mind-blowing kisses they’d shared.

But then she would back off again, and he would be left wondering what he’d done wrong, and if he would ever,
ever
get it right.

Now the Voice, the not-to-be-ignored Voice, was saying he had to somehow step up his game and actually win Max’s heart. For the sake of the entire world. Dylan felt panicky. It wasn’t like winning Max’s heart was taking one for the team. It was the only thing he’d ever wanted.

But until now, he’d never been afraid of what would happen if he failed.

43

GOING ON A dream date is not exactly “hardening your heart,” Max
, I thought to myself uneasily, remembering the Voice’s creepy warning. If being closed off were an Olympic sport, I’d have more gold medals than I could carry. But this whole heart-hardening gig simply was not happening.

Not now. Not tonight.

Because, despite my usual reaction to all things girly (eye roll, look of disgust, general feeling of nausea), tonight I was positively giddy and swooning. I couldn’t help it—I had seriously underestimated the effect a little romance can have on a girl.

Dream date.

Unlike the general population, my idea of a dream date would once have been simply defined as not eating roasted
lizard or Dumpster scraps for dinner. But my first (second? Did the one at the movies count?) “date” with Dylan was certainly more than that.

Much, much more, in fact.

I stared up at the sight before me, jaw on the ground and eyes bugging. See, when Dylan came up to me after school and said “Follow me,” I thought,
What the heck? I’ll just go ahead and follow the guy, let him show me whatever fascinating new discovery he’s made.
I had expected him to demonstrate that he could fly backward or show me a cool rock formation he’d found—something like that.

Let me tell you: I was not expecting
this
.

“H-how did you…?” I stuttered. We were nestled within the branches of a huge fir tree, about thirty feet up. I felt the warmth of Dylan’s hand on my lower back, steadying me as I leaned backward and gaped up, still trying to take in all the amazing details of the house.
My
house.

“I’ve been building it ever since we got here,” Dylan said, smiling shyly at my speechless astonishment. “I went exploring the first day and found this tree, and I knew you liked tree houses….”

I grinned dopily at his perfect face, his soft, anxious eyes.
I knew you liked tree houses.
Dylan had taken the time to listen to what I liked, had been making notes about things that made me happy. The guy had actually been
paying attention
.

And this… this was more than a tree house. It was like the Swiss Family Robinson tree house, Oregon edition. It
had a floor, walls, windows, a roof. All of it was beautifully constructed out of branches and planks, and sort of camouflaged with leafy twigs and vines. From the ground, it would blend with the rest of the tree canopy. But from up here, on this branch, it was stunning. I saw a doorway covered with a green cloth curtain.

“Come on,” Dylan said, taking my hand.

Together we leaped the fifteen feet from the branch to the balcony that ran around three sides of the tree house. Dylan held open the door curtain and the warm glow of candlelight flowed out into the deepening dusk. That’s right—candlelight. The whole shebang.

I swallowed and stepped inside. When Dylan dropped the curtain, it shut out the rest of the world. Dylan and I were alone, out here in the mountain woods, a five-minute flight away from Newton and the rest of the flock.

Dylan looked at my face intently, as if trying to read my expression. I felt the flush creeping up my cheeks, my heart getting all loud and poundy. The combination of the violet dusk and the yellow candlelight made his features even more unbelievably gorgeous.

I turned away from him and walked around the space, running my fingers over the gleaming wood, seeing the notched joints, the clever design. It wasn’t huge inside—maybe eight feet by eight feet. But it was cozy, and plenty big enough.
For what?
I wondered.

“I stole the supplies from woodworking class,” Dylan said, answering my unasked question. “Do you like it?”

“I
love
it,” I murmured, with more ache in my voice than I’d intended. “It’s so th—”

I stopped and sniffed the air.

“So th…?
So th
what?”

“Do I smell… food?”

“You do indeed,” said Dylan. “Roast chicken, pasta, buttery garlic bread, and—”

“
Chocolate cake?
” I moaned. There was a short, square table in the middle of the room, set up with two pillows to sit on. To the left was a low shelf holding everything my hypersensitive-when-it-comes-to-sniffing-out-all-edible-things nose had caught, plus more.

Dylan’s face lit up with another grin, and he made a sweeping gesture for me to sit on one of the pillows. I sank down, starting to wonder if this was just an elaborate dream my traitorous subconscious had concocted. No one had ever done anything like this for me before. No one had ever gone to so much trouble for me. It was… unnerving. I looked up at Dylan and felt—what?

Gratitude. Gratitude and pure happiness. Right there, in that moment,
he
seemed too amazing to be real.

Dylan sat down on the other side of the table and passed me a plate—a
real
plate, not, like, a paper one—and a glass of sparkling cider. It was so prim and proper I almost—
almost
—wished I was wearing a dress or something.

“Eat dinner with me?” Dylan asked shyly. I could feel the heat of the candle between us as the reflection of its flame flickered gorgeously in his eyes.